How To Motivate Your Call Center Agents At A Low Cost

Life would be so easy if everyone was intrinsically motivated! However, more often than not, it's up to management to maintain employee morale and motivation. To activate and inspire self-motivation and boost 'morale' amongst employees, you need to be a dynamic leader. And unfortunately the toughest challenge for call centre managers is keeping this 'morale' at a high level. If your employees are miserable, low productivity and high labor turnover can be the net result. Therefore, it is important to keep your call center agents happy, enthusiastic and motivated all the time.



So, now the question is how you keep your contact center employees motivated and happy. Workplace motivators include both monetary and non-monetary incentives. Both are equally important, but in this article we talk about non-monetary incentives and how they can be used to reduce attrition and keep your call center agents happy and satisfied. It is a lot easier to motivate with money, but the motivation tips mentioned below are much longer lasting and can help transform the organization.



Mentoring and Coaching - It will be helpful to have an employee coaching plan in place. Spending time and coaching employees will make them feel more involved with the organization. It will help good employees, become better.



Praise in public - correct in private. Nothing in the world replaces genuine praise. We often carry a notion in which we believe that praising an employee might lead to distraction and over-confidence. Make praises behavior specific, sincere, timely and public (whenever possible)



Be a psychologist - Everyone in your team has different personalities - adapt accordingly. See things from their perspective and communicate freely. Be what you are and you will see agents open up to you.



Be recognized - Work together as a call center to earn recognition and call center awards. There are even awards programs specifically for call center agents.



Delegate and share responsibility. Give representatives an opportunity to supervise. By rewarding your employees with more responsibilities you will involve them in the organizational web and boost employee recognition.



360 form of evaluation - Allow employees to evaluate you as well. Get the feedback from them and improvise on the points they mention. Make feedback and evaluation a two-way process. If you react to the feedbacks you receive, so will the employees. Set an example.



Increase Hierarchical Positions for Motivation - Stretch the organizational chart by adding more levels of management to your call center structure. Add up to 5 or may be 10 levels to effectively manage all agents. This will also encourage the process of promotion from one level to another.



In the rough times of economic crisis, you must keep your employees happy in order to maximize your companies return on investment and to reduce attrition or turnover rates. A combination of both monetary and non-monetary incentives will keep your call center agents motivated. More importantly, try concentrating on incentive programs such as recognition, appraisal, collaboration and promotion. It will make the employees happy and ultimately your organization will prosper.





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The leaders of the great call centers in each industry meet once a year at the call center awards ceremony of SQM Group. They award the most prestigious North American contact centre awards.