Working remotely has rapidly become the new normal, and more and more companies are adapting their approach forward, working.
Motivating your call center agents isn’t always an easy task. Sometimes it takes quite a chunk of effort to keep the motivation high – especially after a whole day of “no’s”.
It's in your best interest to keep your employees satisfied, as it’s been proven that satisfied employees tend to be more productive. Besides basic things, such as listening to their needs and giving them the proper working conditions, you can also achieve more efficient and happy employees by giving them the right tools and training to fulfill their job.
In general, training and education create more self-confident employees; it helps retain them and strengthen the work´s quality.
Even those with years of experience in the call center field often have trouble convincing the client to say yes over the phone. And, honestly, it’s no easy feat.
Some people get annoyed when they receive a call from a call center employee and instantly say “no” before even hearing what the operator says.
Knowing that, you should teach them how to manage objections. Not only mentally but also tactically. Sometimes it's possible to maintain a conversation using the right techniques and turn a “no” into a “yes”.
If you teach your employees to use these techniques decently, you will not only get better-prepared employees, but at the end of the day, you will also get a higher conversion rate.
Mentally it can be tough to get a lot of ‘’’no’s’’, and most people working in call centers might know the feeling of getting drained during a day filled with rejections.
Ensure that your employees understand that it’s just a part of the job to get rejected – it’s not a personal thing.
Talk openly about “no’s”, failures and mistakes, and let your agents share their experiences so they can learn from each other.
The best way of teaching new skills is to learn on the fly. Most dialer software solutions allow you to listen live as the phoner speaks with a lead, making it possible to give immediate feedback on the agent’s performance.
Some software solutions allow following all employees’ performance at one glance. This is an almost indispensable tool when you need to localize who might have difficulty keeping conversations going, who's struggling with specific issues, or unable to close their sales.
If you want to take your quality assurance and employee coaching further, consider using speech recognition to analyze sales conversations. Speech recognition makes it easy to quickly review all conversations and spot negative and positive trends.
This gives a unique insight into your agents´ every day, which you can translate into concrete actions and techniques that your agents can benefit from in their further sales work.
The faster you react, the easier it is to give your agents the feedback they need.
Your motivation and enthusiasm matter more than you think! Be present as a manager and set a cheerful tone right from the first day of induction. It can help keep the agents going.
Creating a solution and announcing it to the team without explaining it is perhaps one of the most demotivating things you can do. Make sure the agents take part in finding solutions and solving problems.
Arrange a daily huddle with your agents where you spend 10-15 minutes explaining today's assignments, challenges, and priorities, and ask the team what they hear and experience.
When you gather the team and involve them in identifying and solving problems, they gain ownership, which helps them feel more connected to their work.
It can get a bit frustrating calling a potential customer and not answering all the questions they might have.
Sometimes your agents work on different campaigns simultaneously, and it doesn't take much to get confused switching from one assignment to another.
Remember that your agents represent your company´s face and voice, which urges the need for all communication to be unified, consistent, and accurate.
Provide your agents with manageable and easily accessible scripts that give them all the necessary information to make a successful call.
Having the correct information right at your fingertips also eliminate the risk of making errors and misguiding the people you’re calling – that way, you’ll get happier customers, which again gives a higher satisfaction among your agents.
We have gathered some tips on how to write the ultimate call center script, where you might find some inspiration.
It also eliminates the awkward situations where an agent is lost for words and searching for the right phrases.
To avoid misinformation, make sure to update any information linked to a campaign as soon as possible.
It might seem needless to keep everybody updated with rules and legislation on telemarketing and data security, but it's necessary! Not only to ensure that your business is compliant but also to assure not to put your agents in a situation where they can become partly responsible for breaking the law.
You bring comfort and security to their work by teaching your agents the right procedures about legal issues, such as data processing and handling, and how to tackle data security breach.
Calling on the same campaign day in and day out not only sounds boring... IT IS BORING in the long run. Especially when you’re working on campaigns where the leads have been called several times before, and therefore are hard to catch or simply tired of being called down.
A common mistake is to upload many leads and release them all at the same time. This way, you may risk boosting your successes for periods, which can ultimately affect your agents´ motivation.
You can easily add some variation into the work simply by managing your leads more wisely. Try to distribute your leads more evenly by not releasing all your fresh leads in one go. Mix your campaigns to get a more even flow.
Divide your leads into several campaigns so your employees get a good mixture of reused and fresh leads during their workday. In some cases, it can be a good idea to start the day making redials and finish the day calling fresh leads to put some variation into the work.
It can also be a motivating factor to temporarily provide the unmotivated agents with good leads to boost their efficiency and regain their motivation.
It’s common sense that it's more satisfying to succeed rather than to fail. Some agents are better at making cold canvas sales than others – and some agents are experts in closing deals.
By building efficient workflows, you can help your agents create better results by assigning the right tasks to the right agents.
The ultimate way to build and control workflows is to automate as many processes as possible so that the leads are automatically moved from one campaign to another.
Choose a software solution that not only meets your basic needs but also is intuitive and manageable to use – and, most importantly, doesn’t break down!
A system breakdown sounds like a nice occasion to grab a cup of coffee. But several breakdowns during a workday lead to frustration and inefficiency because you’ll get interrupted in the flow. Make sure to choose software with little downtime and minimum maintenance.
Most people will agree that complicated and hard-to-use software solutions can be very time demanding. The more intuitive your system is, the better.
But it’s not only a timesaver to choose manageable easy-to-use software. It also eliminates the risk of making errors. If the system allows you to automate repetitive tasks, you are well on your way to provide your agents with the ultimate tool.
It will help them focus on their sales instead of wasting time filling out forms and manually keeping customer data up to date.
The more it’s possible to customize the user settings, the easier it is to filter out irrelevant features and information that may disturb or confuse your agents.
Customized user settings that allow you to adapt the interface for its purpose and set up individual KPIs for each agent are also recommendable. It might seem like a minor detail, but it can be an important motivating factor for the agents to follow their progress.
Be realistic about your goals, make them visible, and, of course, remember to celebrate when you reach them.
Notice that you can set up many other goals than just the number of closed deals. It’s just a matter of finding the value in the small achievements and progresses you make on your way to closing the deal.
Consider measuring conversion rates, the number of calls made, or the number of interested leads you have managed to contact. These can be just as important measures for your success.
It's a good idea to visualize your goals so that everyone can follow the performance.
One might argue that it can be demotivating to follow the performance when things aren't going that great. But making underperformance visible can be an advantage if you use it tactically and stay positive in the situation.
Use pep talks to make your agents put an extra effort into their work to achieve their goals, and remember to reward them for keeping up the spirit.
Make sure you have the right tools to define and measure your own KPIs – and consistently keep track of them! It makes it easier to make continuous adjustments that ensure your goals are realistic and possible to reach.
Some call centers use gamification to boost performance, by letting the agents compete against each other.
This brings a whole new dimension to the workspace and may work in some situations. But use it carefully, so your agents don’t rush through their calls and forget to be consistent about their communication to the customers.
Work smart, not just hard, and you will achieve spotless call center motivation.
Get more good tips on how to keep motivation high.
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