Personal and organisational growth go hand in hand.  Ross Daniels at Calabrio shares his top tips for an effective wellbeing programme to build a happy and productive team.

In this workforce wellbeing management series, we’re bringing a magnifying glass to the current state of the contact centre, the rising stress levels in contact centres, and the action plan required to address them. In our last article, I outlined technology guides to enable heightened wellbeing across the contact centre and de-stress employees in the face of increasing complexity. I summarised the benefits of Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions and their power to de-stress agents, supervisors and senior managers.  In this third and final part of the series, I’ll delve a little deeper and explore the more subtle elements of wellbeing as a means to promote personal and organisational growth. The two are closely interconnected: the success of one depends on the success of the other.

Top executive challenges

Of course, stress is nothing new, but agents today are far more vocal in raising concerns about it.  This poses some tough challenges for contact centre supervisors as well as for senior managers responsible for customer experience. Top of the list for managers are:

• Recruitment and retention – how do you keep your existing staff happy while attracting new talent with the right skills to best serve your customers?

• Employee onboarding – once hired, the pressure is on to motivate workers—whether remote or in office–while arming them with the competitive knowledge they need to thrive in their jobs.

• Performance coaching – ‘out of sight’ should definitely not mean ‘out of mind’.  With the rise of hybrid working, regular performance coaching and mentoring are now more important than ever before.

7 essential elements of an effective wellbeing strategy

So what can supervisors and senior managers do to build a happy and productive team?  Here are a few ideas to getting started:

1. Make agents feel valued – when agents feel valued, their work is infinitely more meaningful and less stressful.  Agent pay actually ranks third when it comes to the top reasons for leaving after ‘being unhappy in job’ (36%) and ‘limited growth opportunities’ (26%).[i] Personalised training that encourages individual strengths while addressing areas for improvement and clear career paths are the way to make agents feel more valued.

2. Keep pushing flexibility further – after higher pay, which is at the top of agents’ wish list, they next want flexibility (at 34%)[ii] Give agents the autonomy to control their own working day through agent-driven scheduling processes and real-time flexibility to accommodate the unexpected.  Take away the burden of managing schedule changes, shift swaps or overtime and time-off requests by introducing the latest mobile self-service chatbots for agents.  It’s like giving them a powerful time management tool in the palm of their hand.

3. Invest in agent-empowering technologies – based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.  Our own research tells us that agents welcome innovative AI tech as a means to free them from tedious tasks (40%) and focus on more fulfilling and higher-value service that only experienced human agents can provide (30%).[iii] Personalised dashboards are an added bonus for remote-working teams, enabling agents to track their own performance, stay focused, and remain motivated.

4. Strengthen emotional connectedness – asking agents how they feel and what they are doing to de-stress might sound obvious but with so many other distractions away from the traditional office environment, very few supervisors actually do it.  Encourage supervisors to build regular one-to-one sessions into their schedule to increase your agents’ sense of belonging–then maximise analytics to close the wellbeing loop.  The latest VoE (voice of the employee) analytics capture and analyse how frontline staff are feeling in order to identify agents who are struggling, while desktop analytics uncover clunky IT systems that are slowing them down.

5. Aim for easier – as agents deal with more complex customer issues, navigating their way around new technology is essential. And it starts with good training.  Do your agents know what technology they have to make their lives easier and do they know how to use it?  Take a closer look at your systems.  Aim to give agents a consolidated view of customer information all on one screen, then embed VoC (voice of the customer) analytics to support more meaningful, empathetic interactions. 

6. Focus on performance coaching – make mentoring and personal development a priority and take a personalised approach by providing plenty of upskilling opportunities to boost agent confidence and enhance their sense of wellbeing.

Invest in automated performance coaching solutions and make them an intrinsic part of your staff engagement programme, helping to identify skills gaps, individual areas of struggle, successes and opportunities for personal development.

7. Be a connected enterprise – by developing joined-up technology, processes, information and thinking to help staff excel in their roles.  Create a connected culture to collectively impact positive customer outcomes that drive opportunities for organisational growth.

Grab your copy of Calabrio’s brand new digital guide “Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Kit: Practical Strategies & Resources to Turn Workforce Wellbeing into Your Competitive Advantage.”  It’s a practical guide that reinforces the take-aways of this current series of articles while providing additional tips to future-proof your wellbeing strategy.

About the Author

Ross Daniels is Chief Marketing Officer at Calabrio

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com/ and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

With stress levels in contact centres as a constant, Magnus Geverts at Calabrio discusses how to balance the needs of employees and the business with a fresh approach to agent self-scheduling.

I have been in the Workforce Management (WFM) business for over 20 years and during this time, contact centre leaders have again and again told me that one of their biggest challenges is balancing the needs of employees with great customer service. Recently however, the situation has reached crisis point with the pandemic ushering in a new era of ‘The Great Resignation’, where employees are reassessing the impact of their jobs on work/life balance, mental health and overall life goal fulfilment.

This has hit the contact centre industry hardest, where higher-than-ever levels of stress are driving serious agent retention issues. According to Salesforce, 71% of service agents in the US have considered quitting in the past six months, while 86% report they need more from their company in order to stay, citing monetary compensation, career growth opportunities and better management at the top of their wish list.

Other than ‘higher pay’, customers often tell me their agents crave ‘more flexibility’ in their job. While many attempts have been made to address this, such as introducing shift bidding, shift trading and shift preferences, nothing has really worked 100% in favour of frontline employees. Granted, these new ideas catered for the needs of the business but they were not flexible or easy enough for what agents really wanted – that is until now.

7 ways to crack the code using agent self-scheduling

By blending radical new thinking with breakthroughs in technology, I believe that contact centre leaders finally have the opportunity to crack the code, offering businesses the dual ability to give agents more freedom to self-manage their own schedules and keep service levels under control.   When agents are able to plan their work around their life rather than the other way round, stress levels naturally fall and customer satisfaction rises. Here are a few ideas to getting started:

1. Change the mindset – in a world where there are too many customer interactions and not enough agents, the culture has to change. Traditionally, the notion that the customer comes first has prevailed, but at Calabrio we see more and more companies coming to us and saying, “My customers are really important, but my employees are also really important. I can’t afford to lose my people.” Now that is a radical change in thinking.

2. ‘Easy and smart’ does it – and that’s certainly the case when it comes to agent self-scheduling solutions that allow agents to build and edit their own schedules in real-time and on the move, using their mobile devices. Frontline employees can move lunches, catch-up with colleagues and make time for new learning as customer demands or domestic events occur throughout the day. I often hear customers say self-scheduling is a “brilliant idea” because the simple act of having lunch and taking breaks together helps – in their words – “build teammate chemistry.” 

3. Give agents the freedom to create the ideal work-life balance – one of the things agents love most about self-scheduling is it is “easy to fit around their lifestyle”. Adopting modern self-scheduling capabilities empowers agents to achieve an even greater influence over their working day, while allowing contact centre managers to keep control of overall staffing levels.  For example, agents can now add work hours on either unscheduled or scheduled days.  Someone looking for extra shifts can go to the self-scheduling app, see where there is a need for agents and sign up for more hours. At the same time, they could even consider making partial-day shift trades with their colleagues.

4. Remember the secret sauce to self-service automation – comprehensive rule sets and real-time intraday service level controls across all skills ensure that agents can completely self-service, build and modify their schedule, without any intervention from the WFM team. Without this secret sauce of rule sets, the WFM-team would have to manually check and approve changes – far too slow and time-consuming for most busy contact centres today.

5. Build in self-regulating guard rails – look out for agent self-scheduling tools that are configured to automatically take into consideration global work regulations as well as the legal parameters of individual agent contracts. Being able to track and manage an organisation’s compliance against important employment laws means you can always rely on automated approvals to protect you and your staff while building in the highest levels of efficiency to best serve your customers.

6. Raise the status of self-scheduling – make what we call at Calabrio ‘lifestyle scheduling’ an intrinsic part of your strategic Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) framework. Agent self-scheduling is just one way to engage and motivate employees. When combined with modern call recording, quality management and performance coaching, today’s analytics-driven solutions offer a complete, end-to-end personal development toolkit. Personal development plans and insight into individual/self-managed performance boosts employee experience and as a consequence improved customer experience follows.

7. Take inspiration from real-life successes – such as National Debt Relief, an early adopter of agent self-scheduling which claims “it lets agents manage and change their own schedules as unexpected things happen throughout each day, without negatively impacting the contact centre’s service level.”  National Debt Relief is just one of 80% of Calabrio’s customers who say WFM increases their ability to balance both business and agent needs. Why not follow their lead?

Don’t just take my word for it

Self-scheduling is easy and smart for the agent and for the WFM-team – and contact centre staff just love it. As one of our satisfied customers enthused, “Self-scheduling is the best!” while another confesses to be “in love” with self-scheduling because it helps them get over the routine aspects of their job.  Self-scheduling also delivers tangible business value, enabling organisations to gain a critical edge over the competition when it comes to recruiting and retaining the best contact centre talent, essential for business success. Visit Calabrio’s Self-Scheduling hub for more information.

About the Author

Magnus Geverts is VP, Product Marketing at Calabrio

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

Embrace analytics to boost your wellbeing strategy. That’s the message from Ross Daniels at Calabrio. Here, he takes a closer look and gives 3 reasons why you can’t afford to ignore the latest advancements in technologies designed for modern workforce optimisation and engagement.

 In our last blog, we asked the question ‘what does wellbeing really mean?’ and came to the conclusion that the major barrier to wellbeing – stress – affects everyone in the contact centre and beyond. The major stress triggers of hybrid working practices, increased customer demand and a fast-changing competitive landscape are taking their toll as people adapt to a new world of work.  We shared several coping strategies and introduced the importance of data in promoting wellbeing across the whole organisation.

In this second blog of the series, we explore why technologies that humanize experiences through the likes of AI-infused analytics and intelligent automation, such as modern Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions, are the next step towards developing a robust wellbeing strategy.

 3 ways to de-stress the workforce

Today’s WEM solutions offer the perfect de-stressing tool for agents, operational supervisors and senior managers. Use them to enhance staff engagement, optimise contact centre performance and boost profitability:

1. Your day, your way – agent stress is a powder keg just waiting to explode.  Agents cite managing their work/life balance as the biggest stress factor (41%) followed closely by ‘complex customer issues’ (36%) and ‘too many calls’ (34%). When agents take control of their working environment, their mood lifts, they feel energised and stress levels fall.  Bring calm to chaos by introducing self-scheduling tools so your agents can move lunches, catch-up with colleagues and make time for new learning as customer demands or domestic events occur throughout the day.  Equally, give them the chance to add extra working time to their coming week if they need to earn overtime. Self-scheduling gives agents independence and access to instant changes, yet approvals can be automated based on staffing-need parameters.

Why not add personalised dashboards to the mix so your agents can track their own performance to remain focused and motivated?  This is a particular bonus when the majority of people are working remotely.

2. Superstar managers with a listening ear – being a supervisor today is hard work.  They are expected to excel operationally and be excellent people managers but often lack the data and tools to manage the fast-changing dynamics of their contact centre effectively. While many organisations are busy leveraging analytics to uncover the voice of the customer, the same cannot be said when it comes to truly understanding agents.  Roughly half (48%) of contact centre managers report they are not doing enough to focus analytics tools on their teams and cite training opportunities (37%), employee satisfaction (33%) and productivity (33%) as the top missing insights.

Using analytics for personalized performance coaching has been made easier by the introduction of AI enabled recording and tracking of 100% interactions and agent performance metrics. This data can facilitate coaching conversations, while identifying individual or team skill gaps to allow managers to provide better training and support to agents who need it most. Data-driven performance coaching increases agent confidence, satisfaction and productivity while easing operations and a manager’s path to achieve these results.

3. Reap the rewards of a connected enterprise – to grow, organisations need a 360-degree view of their data. Yet, according to Harvard Business Review, while 83% of companies stress the importance of turning data into actionable insight, only 22% of senior executives feel their company is successful at doing this. How can business leaders possibly make informed decisions and improve profits if they have no clear visibility of what is happening across their organisation?

Successful leaders recognise the importance of connectedness in every sense of the word – IT systems, information, ways of working and thinking.  It’s an approach that overcomes the harmful silos that often get in the way of becoming a connected enterprise, where all parts of the organisation work together to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

The foundation of a successful customer-centric organisation lies with positioning the contact centre at the heart of the business intelligence platform.  Sharing valuable data on the real thoughts and feelings of customers depends on seamless integration with other departments using technology such as Calabrio’s enterprise customer experience intelligence (CXI).  Organisations benefit from becoming more connected to their customers and their employees, and pervading stress just melts away.  

In our next blog, we delve deeper into the concept of wellbeing and how it can be used to drive personal and organisational growth.  For more ideas and inspiration on identifying stress triggers, process improvement checklists and tech buyer guides for managing wellbeing across the entire workforce download Calabrio’s Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Toolkit.

About the Author

Ross Daniels is Chief Marketing Officer at Calabrio

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com/ and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

Stress is a major barrier to success and it is affecting everyone.  In a new three-part series Ross Daniels introduces Calabrio’s campaign to support improvements for people, processes and technology to enable greater wellbeing across contact centre organisations. 

This first article outlines the key triggers for agents, supervisors and senior managers and shows why it pays to take a comprehensive approach to organisational wellbeing

The impact of the past few years has been wide-reaching and traumatic.  Flexible working practices, growing customer demands and a fast-changing competitive landscape are all taking their toll.  And these stressors are affecting everyone in the contact centre and beyond.

Let’s start with frontline staff

Stress levels among agents are rising sharply with 96% claiming to feel stressed at least once a week, while 33% of agents are stressed multiple times a week – up from 25% in 2017. Is it any wonder, given that they are dealing with 14.4 additional omnichannel interactions per day?[i]  At the same time, many people are still adapting psychologically to an often disorienting ‘work from anywhere’ culture while faced with the practicalities of juggling home and work life.

Agent stress has a knock-on effect on supervisors and customer experience (CX)

A recent study revealed that 60% of respondents agreed that staff attrition and absence, while initially pandemic-related, is still causing CX issues.[ii]  Just how do those running the show (aka the operations of the contact centre) juggle agent schedules and skills throughout the day while planning for future recruitment, coaching and training, as cost-effectively as possible?  Contact centre leaders also need to understand the bigger picture, such as why staff are leaving for the competition or why customer churn rates are higher than usual.  The pressure is on contact centre operations to manage agent stress while at the same time dealing with hybrid working and increased numbers of digital communication channels.  Add to this the need to optimise performance, keep teams connected and meet ever increasing customer expectations.  It’s all created a perfect storm for anxiety and stress that threatens the wellbeing of employees and the long-term prosperity of their organisations.  What can be done to reverse the trend?

Three ways to improve wellbeing

Wellbeing translates into agents who are empowered, taking control of their working lives and the customer experience; where supervisors support the business with a motivated workforce that surpasses key metrics and service levels and where executives strike a fine balance between cost control, innovation and business expansion.  Here are three ideas for inspiration:

1. Take an all-round approach – find out what is working and what isn’t – for your agents, supervisors and senior managers.  Look beyond the contact centre and think about involving other parts of the organisation, including subject matter experts, to improve knowledge, boost contact centre performance and enhance wellbeing.  What processes are in place to share best-practice CX learning so that all departments are encouraged to do better and increase their own sense of wellbeing?

2.  Make the most of data – with customer and employee loyalty in flux during the pandemic, companies need deep, relevant insights inside and outside the organisation to help protect and grow customer relationships while keeping staff from straying to the competition.  All too often however, valuable information gets trapped inside the contact centre.  Essentially, many organisations are sitting on a goldmine of intelligence that isn’t used effectively – are you being held back by data silos or clunky IT systems?

3. Follow the leaders – success depends on gaining control over data using data-driven technologies.  For example, Thomson Reuters wanted to understand how the introduction of remote agent onboarding and training, due to COVID-19, was affecting its business.  Using the latest analytics, the company identified calls with long and multiple hold times, then worked to establish the reasons why this was happening.  The goal was to eliminate putting calls on hold.  As a result of the analytics programme the company enjoyed significant benefits with a wide-ranging impact on organisational wellbeing.  For example, the Tax & Accounting Professionals Business Unit potentially saved up to 3% of its contact centre’s annual operating budget.  Meanwhile, average call times reduced by more than 90 seconds, call holds per call dropped one-and-a-half times and there was a 6.4% increase in customer satisfaction.

Success depends on removing stress at all levels of the organisation.  In our next article, discover how modern Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions including AI-infused analytics are the answer to wellbeing.  We will also look at how technology can be integral to enhancing staff engagement, optimising contact centre performance and boosting profitability.  Head to the new “Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Kit” to gain hints and tips for three key stakeholders, with the main stressors to target, checklists to process change and tech buyer’s guides. 

About the Author

Ross Daniels is Chief Marketing Officer at Calabrio.

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com/ and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.