Three Essential Strategies for a Winning Contact Center Culture

Contact centers are increasingly expected to deliver more, but often with less time and fewer resources.

Continually improving operations, streamlining processes and staying ahead of the technology curve are important, but your most important asset is people. Keeping pace requires going back to employee engagement — attracting talent, encouraging growth and maintaining momentum through reward and recognition.

Employee and customer satisfaction are inextricably linked. Satisfied customers help build your reputation — and grow your business.

1. Commit to customer centricity

Build a team where every member genuinely cares about delighting customers daily. Many financial institutions fail to differentiate themselves in customer experience opportunities that matter. Superb handling of these moments requires an instinctive frontline response that puts the customer’s human needs first.

Compassion, understanding, active listening have always been important, but decision making, critical thinking and using good judgment are equally critical.

Critical thinking goes beyond just remembering facts to understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and problem solving. After learning the issue, an agent must be able to determine next steps to resolution, especially when a customer’s issue is unique. The ability to think quickly and confidently to resolve an issue is important when interacting with customers.

2. Cultivate a path to performance

Customers are becoming increasingly comfortable with self-service tools, so live calls to contact centers are often more complicated. Providing high-quality service depends on knowledgeable agents with proper training and support. Failure to retain these employees can have significant repercussions: employee attrition can erode customer satisfaction while increasing operating costs.

A high-performance culture takes an intentional, team approach to employee engagement, planning and management.

Set clear expectations around targets and goals. Open communication ensures everyone understands what the goals are and why the goals have been set.

Creating a winning culture also means cultivating career-pathing opportunities. Employees are often looking for a place they can grow and make a difference.

Career pathing begins with an individual development plan and career progression initiatives. Build goals around each development initiative, so employees are prepared when new opportunities become available. The contact center can be a great training ground for other areas in the organization.

3. Create a community of caring

Everyone owns recognition. The contact center is a community, and how the community embraces, supports, celebrates and recognizes each other is crucial to keeping momentum up and everyone focused.

Key to retaining rich talent is rewarding specialists who are committed to your values, performance excellence, thriving in a team environment and delighting customers.

Whether it’s recognition for a single outstanding customer experience, or a monthly or team performance award, all help foster a culture of commitment, fun and focus.

A culture-first approach to winning customer experiences

Once viewed as a transactional cost center, today’s contact center is now the pulse of the organization and the emotional component of a brand. Through the interactions your contact center employees have with consumers, financial institutions are better able to gather valuable customer insight and use it to grow deeper relationships … and grow as an organization. 

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