In order to continue providing the best customer support a company has to offer, it is crucial to ensure the retention of the corresponding quality agents who do the providing. To start the year off right, make sure you are looking inward as well as outward and keeping your agents happy so that in turn they will nurture your customers to happiness and loyalty. Here are some of this month’s top articles on how to ensure your support agents maintain their sanity and remain satisfied in their roles.
1. Raising the bar? Is it really necessary to go that far?
It is easy to make assumptions about what employees want and how to keep them happy. One such common assumption is that in order to secure the employments of your agents, you need to provide them with a raise. This useful article from Business Weekly provides 12 alternatives to the traditional method of securing a spot on your support team.
2. Recognize your greatest assets and treat them accordingly.
This article from business2community could not emphasize more the importance of investing in your employees, your company’s greatest asset: “They are ones who are providing the services and the ones who are directly in contact with your clients”. Employees who are treated well are then able to tackle their daily tasks with passion and determination.
3. Provide reasonable job expectations, before it is too late.
Most customer service team leaders adore the word “multi-tasking”. They stick it everywhere in the job description add, and bring it up on several occasions during job interviews. This article by the Miami Herald lets us in on a slighting different perspective, suggesting that overburdening employees with vastly different assignments is a recipe for team “burnout”.
When “95 percent of human resource leaders say burnout is the No. 1 culprit of turnover”, we may want to consider some new ideas to improve productivity in the long run rather than short term over-productivity which is ultimately counterproductive.
4. Employees can take responsibility for their own wellbeing.
Burnout is not a factor determined solely by the employer, believe it or not! There are some very basic and practical steps that agents can implement themselves in order to avoid burnout when facing the daily grind, as listed by money.usnews.com in their helpful article.
5. Does the phrase ‘fake it till you make it’ come with a price?
A completely different school of thought is explained in this article by the University of Greenwich, introducing the terms “existential labour” and “surface acting”. It appears that sounding or behaving upbeat does not work long-term, and it is crucial that the company cares for their employees and ensures they have a real reason to smile.
Customer Service teams and individuals need to remain aware of the challenges they face regularly during their daily work and the toll it actually takes on their health, mind and spirit. This is crucial as they need to ensure that they are being treated well and cared for by their company, and that they are not enduring any emotional abuse by clients.
Agents are not robots, and companies will benefit in multiple ways should they make an effort to remember this fact and act on it by going above and beyond to keep them happy.
