New Report: Contact Center Leaders Don’t Get Engagement

Happy agents lead to happy customers.

This pithy saying is a widely held belief among contact center leaders. The logic flows that if you engage your contact center agents, they’ll deliver outstanding service.

A new report from ICMI reveals a severe disconnect between this belief and what contact center leaders are actually doing.

The data suggests that most contact center leaders don’t get engagement.

This post examines the disconnect, uncovers some root causes, and makes a few suggestions for correcting the problem.

The Big Disconnect

It’s hard to find any disagreement that it’s important for contact center agents to be engaged. Here are two findings from ICMI’s study:

  • 99% of respondents believe that agent engagement drives performance
  • 88.8% believe that agent engagement is a priority in their organization

Now, here’s where the disconnect begins. Only 7 percent of contact center leaders said that agent engagement was a top priority. 

The disconnect is further revealed by what contact centers measure. Here are the top five agent metrics in contact centers today:

  1. Quality - 74%
  2. Average Handle Time - 73%
  3. Customer Satisfaction - 58%
  4. Adherence to Schedule - 58%
  5. First Contact Resolution - 43%

These metrics suggest that compliance and efficiency are the true priorities in today’s contact centers.

Justin Robbins, ICMI’s Senior Analyst, shared with me that only 19 percent of contact centers measure agent engagement.

 

Root Causes

A lack of clarity makes engagement hard to manage.

Many reports, like ICMI’s, omit a definition. The assumption is the term is clear so it doesn’t need to be defined.

Unfortunately, there’s a lack of consensus. There’s even disagreement among the top employee engagement consulting firms, like Gallup and BlessingWhite.

Here’s the definition I prefer:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

This definition helps identify some additional root causes.

Engaged agents want to serve their customers at the highest level. Unfortunately, many contact centers make this difficult.

The ICMI report also looked at what would motivate contact centers to invest in giving agents better tools to serve their customers. Unsurprisingly, the top choice was cost.

 

Engagement Solutions

These issues always come down to dollars and cents.

That’s why employee engagement initiatives fail. They’re reduced to surveys on touchy-feely subjects like morale.

You’ll need to make a stronger business case if you really want to engage your agents.

Start by going back to the definition of employee engagement. There’s no soft stuff here. This is all about results:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

Next, get out your calculator and add up the cost of making it hard for agents to do a great job. Here are just a few options to consider:

  • What’s the real cost of agent turnover?
  • How much could we save by improving first contact resolution?
  • Could we reduce customer churn through better service? If so, how much?

There’s real savings here. 

Even a 10 percent reduction in turnover, repeat contacts, or customer churn could add up quickly. Measure those items and you’ll be much more likely to find the budget you need to improve agent engagement.

Improve Agent Morale by Driving Results

Note: This post originally appeared on the ICMI blog.

There are two hot topics in the contact center that never seem to go away: improving morale and driving results.

The basic idea is we need to find a way to improve morale so we can drive better results. 

But, what if we have it in the wrong order?

What Demotivates Agents

A 2006 Harvard Management Update article  revealed that employee motivation is at it’s peak when employees begin a new job, but morale tends to decline sharply after the first six months.

This suggests that employees are naturally motivated. Something happens on the job that demotivates them.

For many contact center agents, it’s the inability to drive results. Agents consistently say they’re frustrated by obstacles that make it hard for them to do their job.

It could be a defective product, a broken process, or an unfriendly policy. Whatever the case, morale sinks when agents feel they can’t do something about it. Morale worsens further when they feel their ideas for improvement aren’t being heard.

Contact center leaders are consumed with motivating agents, but we should really focus on preventing demotivation by helping agents drive results.

 

Agents Love to Win

High performing teams thrive on achievement. Spirits soar when agents can solve problems and help their customers.

A terrific example comes from Rackspace, a provider of cloud management services.

A communications outage brought down their support center phone and chat systems. Customers were suddenly unable to get assistance.

Agents leapt into action. They reached out to upset customers on Twitter. Many used their personal cell phones to get customers on the phone and help them solve problems. 

Nobody in management told them to do this. Agents weren’t given incentives to go above and beyond. They were motivated to do it because they cared so deeply about serving their customers. 

Rackspace calls this Fanatical Support. It’s something their agents focus on every day, with every interaction.

Other contact centers see a similar connection between agent motivation and the ability to get results.

The customer service team at Phone.com, a telephone service provider for small businesses, focuses on providing awesome service to every customer. They’ve enjoyed exceptionally low turnover because agents feel empowered to be awesome.

One agent said, “I love working here because it's so much less scripted than other contact centers. We’re able to just focus on helping our customers.”

Having a clear, results-focused purpose keeps agents energized.

Managers in these contact centers don’t see themselves as cheerleaders or motivators. They’re enablers who empower agents to overcome challenges and drive results. 

 

Helping Agents Drive Results

Here are just a few ways to sustain morale by helping your agents drive results:

  1. Hold survey review sessions. Gather the team and dig into your latest customer service survey. Ask for their input on solving the problems that generate the most negative feedback.
  2. Enlist your veterans. Let your experienced employees share their knowledge. Have them help train and mentor newer employees. Give them special projects like updating your product knowledge wiki.
  3. Share macro data. Contact centers are awash in handle time, service levels, and other micro stats. Show your agents how they can impact macro data such as CSAT scores, customer retention, and customer growth. 
  4. Remove obstacles. A contact center leader’s number one job should be to make it easy for agents to succeed. Find and remove obstacles that get in their way. Let your agents know you’re going to bat for them!
  5. Give feedback, not scores. Contact center agents are constantly measured, but many crave real, substantive feedback. Look past QA scores and have a conversation with agents about specific techniques they can work on to serve their customers at an even higher level.

These are just a few ideas. Whatever you try, the goal is to help agents achieve better results. 

If you can help them do great things, you’ll see their motivation soar.

How to Engage Your Employees: A Step-by-Step Guide

There's a big problem with employee engagement.

The benefits of engaging employees are widely publicized. Engaged employees are more productive, stay longer, and provide better customer service. You may have also heard that disengaged employees cost companies billions of dollars per year. Or is it trillions?

Gallup's popular employee engagement index has hardly moved despite these benefits. The index sat at 30 percent in 2006 when I gave my first presentation on employee engagement. In 2018, it was up to just 34 percent.

Unfortunately, employee engagement is a mushy concept. What exactly is it? And how exactly do you improve?

This guide will demystify employee engagement. You'll learn exactly what it is, why engaged employees are critical, and how to improve engagement step-by-step.

A team of engaged employees sitting at a conference table, celebrating a recent success.

What is employee engagement?

The lack of a definition hampers a lot of employee engagement initiatives. Leaders agree on the abstract concept, but aren't quite sure what to do.

Even leading consulting firms disagree on the definition.

  • Is it employee satisfaction?

  • Commitment to the company?

  • An emotional connection to the job?

It’s important to gain clear agreement on the meaning of employee engagement. You can't measure, improve, or sustain something if you can't define it.

Here’s the definition we’ll use for the purposes of this guide:

An engaged employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

I like this definition because it's specific. It lays out a clear description of what engagement looks like. You need to do three things if you want to engage people:

  1. Define organizational success.

  2. Share that definition with employees.

  3. Help employees contribute.

We'll take a closer look at each step in just a moment. But first, let's look at the impact of having engaged employees.


Why is employee engagement important?

The case for employee engagement is not a philosophical one. Engaged employees perform their jobs better and contribute more to the organization's success.

Don't just rely on vague statistics or anecdotes.

You need to make the case for employee engagement using hard numbers if you want to get executive buy-in. This means calculating the true financial impact of engagement if at all possible.

Start by identifying key metrics that are likely affected by employee engagement. In other words, what is the impact of employees doing their jobs well? Examples include:

  • Productivity

  • Quality

  • Customer satisfaction

  • Revenue

  • Cost savings

You can also look at the secondary costs of engagement. Here are a few examples of those:

  • Turnover. Disengaged employees are more likely to leave.

  • Theft. Disengaged employees are more likely to steal.

  • Harassment. Disengaged employees are more likely to harass others.

Once you identify the metrics affected by employee engagement, use these metrics to assess the financial impact. For example, a hospital decided to focus on employee turnover. Their annual turnover rate for nursing staff was 30 percent compared to an industry average of 20 percent.

The hospital took the following steps to calculate a hard dollar estimate that their CFO endorsed:

  1. Calculated the hard cost of turnover using this worksheet.

  2. Calculated the cost of turnover at 30 percent.

  3. Calculated the cost if turnover was just 20 percent.

The difference between #2 and #3 equaled the potential amount the hospital could save by reducing nursing turnover through employee engagement. The CFO calculated that reducing turnover from 30 down to 20 percent would result $100,000 in hard cost savings. 

He acknowledged this was a very conservative number. It didn’t account for hard-to-measure soft costs such as improved patient outcomes. By the CFO’s own estimate, the potential soft cost savings were $1,000,000.

Translating employee engagement into financial impact will get your executives' attention!

Need some additional ideas? Here are 13 ways to calculate the true cost of customer service.


How do you engage employees?

An engaged employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success. You can engage employees by doing three things:

  1. Define organizational success

  2. Share that definition with employees

  3. Help employees contribute

Let's break this down and take a closer look at each step.


Step 1: Define Organizational Success

In customer-focused organizations, success is defined by a customer service vision statement. This is a shared definition of outstanding customer service (or experience) that gets everyone on the same page. The customer service vision often does double duty as the corporate mission, vision, or brand statement.

There are three characteristics of a good customer service vision:

  1. It's simple and easily understood.

  2. It's focused on customers.

  3. It reflects both who you are now, and who you aspire to be in the future.

Here's an example from Convo, an app-based video relay service for deaf and hard of hearing people:

Our mission is to connect humans through universal communication solutions shaped by visual and cultural experiences.

Notice Convo's customer service vision matches all three characteristics:

  1. Simple: it's just one sentence.

  2. Customer-focused: it describes what Convo wants to do for people.

  3. Authentic: this is what Convo is already doing, and wants to do more.

You can use this guide to create a customer service vision for your organization, department, or team.


Step 2: Share the definition with employees

Employees can't be expected to contribute to organizational success unless they know what makes the organization successful. This is why it's critical to share the customer service vision with employees.

It's not enough for employees to be aware that the customer service vision exists. They need to use it to guide their work.

You'll know you've shared the vision successfully when employees can answer three questions about it:

  1. What is the vision?

  2. What does it mean?

  3. How do I personally contribute?

Here's a sample communication plan from The Service Culture Handbook:

Phase One: Announcement

  1. Share the customer service vision via company-wide communication from the CEO.

  2. Reinforce the vision via messaging from the corporate communications department.

  3. Display the vision on signage ad posters at all company locations.

Phase Two: Initial Training

  1. Hold town hall-style kick-off meetings at each location to discuss the vision.

  2. Create one-page job aids to distribute to all employees.

  3. Provide employees with mugs, t-shirts, and other swag to support the vision.

Phase Three: In-Depth Training

  1. Integrate the customer service vision into existing training programs.

  2. Have managers follow up with employees after the training to observe them using the vision to guide their daily work.

  3. Integrate the vision into an existing employee feedback form used by managers to coach employees on their performance.

This is just an example. You can use any approach that works for your organization's unique culture and situation. 

Help employees contribute

Most employees want to do a good job. The challenge is knowing exactly how and being empowered to do great work. 

Employees lose their natural motivation when they aren't empowered. People start jobs with high hopes and good intentions, but that enthusiasm is ground down over time through poor products, bad policies, a lack of resources, and poor leadership. 

Eventually, employees develop an issue called learned helplessness, where they accept that failure is a foregone conclusion so they stop trying. 

In other words, the employee becomes disengaged.

Empowering employees means enabling them to do great work. There are three elements to this:

  • Resources: employees need the right resources.

  • Processes: best practices must be identified and shared.

  • Authority: employees must have the authority to do what's right.

Visit this empowerment resource page to learn more about empowerment and find a step-by-step guide.



Employee Engagement Resources

Here are selected resources to help you engage employees.

Using the Employee Engagement Cycle

This post originally appeared on the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) website as part of their Expert's Angle series.

Call centers with customer-focused cultures achieve their success by getting a high level of agent buy-in. One way to do this is to ensure that your culture is aligned with the five steps in the Employee Engagement Cycle. This is a framework that identifies critical points where a call center can influence employee engagement.

Read on to learn about each step in the cycle. At the end you’ll find a questionnaire you can use to evaluate your own call center’s alignment.

Recruiting

Recruiting new employees represents an opportunity to find people who are passionate about our products or services. Even more important than previous job experience or call center skills, we want people who will love to do what we want them to do. These employees will serve our customers better, work harder, and are less likely to leave the company than someone who is just here for a paycheck.

Call centers can hire for passion by identifying a set of specific traits that the ideal employee should possess. For example, a company that connects people with music teachers hires people who love music. A software manufacturer hires people who work with computers in their spare time. A company that sells accessories for boats and RVs hires people who love boating or camping.

On-boarding

The on-boarding process is more than just new employee orientation or that pile of new hire paperwork. On-boarding really refers to the period that begins when the employee accepts the job offer and ends when the employee is fully trained. This is a critical time when the employee decides whether they made a good decision to join your company. This is also when they learn about your call center culture and the behaviors that are expected to go along with it.

One medical device manufacturer used the on-boarding period to help their new employees unlearn habits they picked up in other call centers. For example, in their previous job a new employee may have referred to an out of stock product as being “on backorder” and simply quoted an expected time when the item would be back in stock. Here, an unavailable product wasn’t acceptable since a patient might need it for an upcoming surgical procedure. Finding the right product was the top priority, and employees were expected to go to great lengths to find a solution, even if it meant contacting another client to see if they had one that could be borrowed. Most new employees were never expected to do all that in their previous call center jobs, so the on-boarding period was an important step towards creating new habits.

Development

Companies that spend time hiring right and instilling cultural values in new employees can still lose their way if those values aren’t consistently reinforced. In many cases, the cultural norms taught during the on-boarding period don’t match the reality of the new employee’s day-to-day working environment. One way to avoid this problem is to ensure that all employee development includes a culture component as a way of consistently reminding employees about culture.

A software company successfully reinforced its culture throughout their call centers by insisting that all employee development programs be connected in some way to their company values. For example, when they instituted a customer service training program, a module was included that showed call center agents how to serve their customers in a way that was consistent with the organizational values. After the training, call center supervisors reinforced the values when providing an agent with feedback about their performance or coaching them on how to handle a particular call.

Evaluations

Annual performance evaluations don’t have a lot of fans these days. They are often treated as little more than a stack of annoying paperwork designed to give employees seemingly arbitrary ratings on a set of generic qualities such as “teamwork” or “dependability.” Annual performance reviews can become much more impactful when they are used to reinforce company culture

In one example, a company’s values were incorporated into performance evaluations and employees were evaluated in part on how aligned they were with the culture. The evaluation form contained a set of behavioral descriptions for each value to help differentiate between positive (or “aligned”) performance and negative (or “misaligned”) performance. This turned the evaluation into an opportunity to discuss culture, set goals for future performance, and align employee performance with desired norms.

Exits

We’ve all seen the impact of employees who actively work against the company’s best interests. These employees’ behavior becomes so toxic that it impacts other employees’ performance, and they may even attempt to recruit others to join them in their state of discontent. If left unchecked, toxic employees can lower morale, reduce call center performance, and cause increased turnover.

The best solution to dealing with toxic employees is to make it clear their behavior won’t be tolerated. Give them the choice of aligning their behavior with cultural expectations or leaving the team. Employees who refuse to be a positive part of your culture should be removed from the team as quickly as legally possible. It’s never an easy step to take, but I’ve observed countless managers who immediately saw improvements in morale and productivity after letting a toxic employee go.

Conclusion

Here’s a quick quiz if you’d like to evaluate your call center’s cultural alignment. It can be used to foster internal dialogue around better aligning the steps in the Employee Engagement Cycle.

Never reward employees for outstanding survey scores

The Westin Portland is one of my favorite hotels. Their warm and attentive associates always make me feel welcome and you can’t beat their location in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon. I’ve stayed their many times over the years and have come to feel like the hotel is my home away from home.

When I started writing my customer service book in 2011, I interviewed then General Manager Chris Lorino to learn some of the hotel’s service secrets. One of Lorino’s strongest beliefs was that you should never reward employees for achieving outstanding survey scores. He felt it was important to build a team of people who naturally wanted to serve guests at the highest level. In Lorino's opinion, a reward system would inevitably get in the way.

Both leading research on employee motivation and Lorino’s own success as a General Manager suggest that he is absolutely correct.

Rewards vs. Recognition

It’s important to differentiate between rewards and recognition. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that employees shouldn’t be rewarded for outstanding service, but go ahead and recognize them all you want.

Rewards are if-then propositions. The prize and the criteria for earning the prize are spelled out ahead of time. For example, if you average a certain score on your customer service survey, then you will get a gift card.

Recognition is unexpected reinforcement of results that have already been achieved. An example would be giving an employee a gift card out of the blue to thank them for achieving a high average score on their customer service survey.

Eyes On the Prize

The biggest problem with rewarding employees for good customer service is it takes their attention away from providing outstanding service and re-focuses them on winning the prize.

We’ve probably all seen examples of the behavior changes this can cause:

  • Directly asking customers to provide the top score on a survey
  • Selectively encouraging only highly satisfied customers to complete a survey
  • Submitting phony surveys to bolster scores (yes, this happens)

The Goal is not the Goal

What’s the purpose of conducting a customer service survey?

When employees are rewarded for achieving a certain score they may act as though achieving that score is the ultimate goal. However, most customer service professionals will tell you that the survey is really a tool that can be used for continuous improvement.

Here are a few ways that focusing solely on a survey goal might prevent continuous improvement:

  • Employees may care less about service failures if the average looks good.
  • It lessens the need for analysis to identify customer pain points.
  • Employees may stop trying if they feel there’s nothing left to prove.

Let’s imagine a survey of 100 customers where 90 are satisfied and 10 are unhappy. If my employees are focused on achieving a specific target, they may feel great about a 90% customer satisfaction level. However, they’ll be much more eager to find out how to win over the other 10% if their true focus is continuous improvement.

So, how do I motivate the team?

If you want to learn more about the science behind rewards and employee motivation, check out Daniel Pink’s fascinating book, Drive. Pink's biggest point is that the true motivating factors are purpose, autonomy, and mastery. Let's look at each one in a customer service context:

Purpose
The very best organizations have a clear and compelling customer service vision that describes the type of service they're hoping to provide. It's amazing what happens when the whole team is unified around a common objective. 

Autonomy
Nobody wants to be micromanaged. Give people the resources, training, and authority to get the job done right and then get out of their way and you'll see people taking responsibility for the results they achieve.

Mastery
We all want to be good at what we do. Help bring out the best in employees through coaching, training, and continuous feedback and you'll find that people will step up to the challenge of becoming the very best they can be.

What are we really talking about when it comes to service?

P.T. Barnum famously bet on his customers getting confused by fancy words when he wanted to pump up profits at his museum. Barnum posted signs marked “This Way to the Great Egress” that led people towards what they assumed was the museum’s latest attraction. Gullible patrons were surprised to learn that "egress" is really just another word for exit when they followed the signs straight out of the building.

That sort of trick wouldn’t pass muster with today’s customers (imagine the Yelp reviews!) but there’s still plenty of confusing language used in customer service. Clearing up this confusion may be one of the keys to preventing service failures in your organization.

Here are a few examples:

Customer Satisfaction. What is it? Is it good? Or, is aiming for customer satisfaction setting our sights too low when we really should be achieving customer delight? And, if customer delight is the goal, should I scrap my C-Sat survey in favor of a C-Del metric?

Employee Engagement. It seems to be a matter of fact that positive employee engagement is strongly correlated with high levels of customer satisfaction. Or is it correlated with high levels of customer engagement? What exactly is employee engagement anyway? Even the top employee engagement consulting firms don't agree (see my post).

Outstanding service. This is good, right? Just ask five people and they’ll all agree. Then ask them what outstanding service looks like and they’ll all give different answers. None of them will be necessarily wrong, just different. (See my simple explanation.)

These are really rhetorical questions in an effort to highlight the need for a common frame of reference, though I wouldn't mind you sharing your answers in the comments section below.

Practical Application
Here are a few simple examples of how you can establish a common frame of reference when talking about customer service.

Training. Before conducting customer service training, I work with my clients to create a clear definition of outstanding service using a Customer Service Vision tool.

Surveys. Before writing your survey questions, take a moment to think about what you really want to learn about your customers and what you will do to act upon that data. (See "C-Sat: So what?")

Strategy. Frame customer service or employee engagement initiatives around SMART goals rather than writing fuzzy objectives like “improve customer service.” 

Less than half of U.S. employees are satisified with their jobs

A new report from the Conference Board reveals that only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. A natural first reaction is to blame the current economy, but  worker satisfaction has been steadily declining from a high of 61% in 1987, when the Conference Board begun studying worker satisfaction.

I'm sure there are many contributing factors, but I have two primary theories on why this is happening.  (I'd love to hear yours, so please leave your comments...)

Theory #1: Employers are not doing a good job of hiring people who will love their jobs

The typical employee selection process includes a glance at the resume for similar job experience, an interview full of "tell me about a time when" and "where do you see yourself in five years", and a post-interview discussion about whether Candidate A or Candidate B is the best hire. Most organizations I've encountered do not put any deliberate effort into identifying whether a job applicant will fit in with the organizational culture. Sure, there may be some form of gut-check like "I think Mary would really get along with the team," but nothing specific. Some companies administer pre-hire personality assessments, but the results are often compared to a model provided by the assessment vendor rather than the employer's own workforce.

A few companies do a great job of hiring for culture fit and have some great results to show for it. Online retailer Zappos.com puts a lot of effort into hiring people who will love working there. It's no wonder they have developed a reputation for amazing customer service and they are currently #23 on Fortune's "Best Companies to Work For" list.

Theory #2: Employees are not taking enough ownership of their job satisfaction.

The current economy has definitely made it difficult to be satisfied at work, but the trend in declining worker satisfaction has spanned both good and bad job markets. There has to be more to job satisfaction than "the economy". I think it comes from unrealistic employee expectations. We want high pay, enjoyable work, wonderful co-workers, a great boss, and awesome benefits, and we want it all right now. If we're lucky, we'll get some of these, but it's wishful thinking to get it all without a lot of effort.

There seem to be two reasonable choices for dealing with a job you don't like. Choice #1: proactively figure out how to make the job enjoyable. (GREAT book on this - Love It, Don't Leave It). Choice #2: find a new job that you love, even if it means developing new skills, entering into a different field, or even readjusting your expectations. Many people expect a Choice #3: be miserable and wait for someone (the boss? the government? a genie?) to come along and make it all better, but that's unlikely to happen.

Gallup finds more reasons to micromanage

A new study from the Gallup Management Journal has discovered that igorning your employees may be even more harmful than focusing on their weaknesses. Not unexpectedly, focusing on employee strengths yields the best results of all.  You may know that I'm an unabashed fan of micromanaging, and this data provides more fuel for my micromanagement fire!

Micromanagement yields the best results.
I define micromanagement as actively managing employees' performance, helping them become successful, and gradually providing them with more and more autonomy as they demonstrate competency and earn trust. This definition is very consistent with a "strengths-based" management philosophy.

In Gallup's study, managers that focus on employee strengths have the most engaged employees (61%) and the fewest actively disengaged employees (1%).

Micro-meddling yields worse results.
Often confused with micromanagement, micro-meddling is a management approach that focuses on employee weaknesses. Micro-meddlers don't set clear expectations and spend their time correcting performance rather than encouraging growth. Unlike micromanagers who loosen the reins over time, micro-meddlers make it impossible for employees to earn trust and autonomy.

In Gallup's study, managers that focus on employee weaknesses engage (on average) 45% of their employees while an average of 22% of their employees are actively disengaged.

Not managing is worst of all.
The hands-off approach is even worse than micro-meddling. Gallup found that only 2% of employees who felt ignored by their managers were engaged compared to 40% who were actively disengaged. Managers who fail to provide clear and consistent direction or any feedback often choose this style because they want to avoid conflict, want to achieve a positive reputation with their employees, or are simply overwhelmed with other responsibilities.  Whatever the cause, this is clearly the worst way to go.

Check out an article on Gallup's study here.

Read my post, "Long Live the Micromanager" for more info.