7 Ways To Improve Your Contact Centre's Culture A great contact centre's culture cannot be integrated easily and quickly.

Great companies are enabled to achieve great business driven by great corporate cultures. An excellent contact culture helps to hire new and retain the star employees. By motivating employees at all ranks stimulate the employees to perform their best that too for organizational benefits, boost a quality customer service and takes the overall the business to a higher level.

It has been often noticed that contact center companies are quite popular for a few short stints or hazardous lifestyle but not as a career. Adding to it developing an excellent work culture in the top most priority and a considerable challenge. Below are the seven ways to incorporate a positive work life of employees and improve your contact centre's culture:

#1 Set Achievable Targets!

Make sure that your priority target should be in the numbers. After everything you are doing to get maximum revenues for your company isn't it? Don't ever get your target out of focus, it should be your top on your priority list. Get your target numbers right, and accordingly, formulate your planning and strategy to meet your team / organizational target timely by conveying same to your associates and agents.

Most of the decision makers just work on statistics and generates unrealistic targets. Thus, by doing so no matter how much your team members work hard or achieve numbers, but the set target is still unreachable. This further results as one of the most demotivating factors for employees towards their work, management, and company at large. To avoid such consequences make sure you set a realistic and achievable goals for your team. So, remove unworkable targets from your target list.

Moreover just managing by numbers with metrics like AHT (average call handling time) for customer calls will not bring desired results. Thus, focusing merely on numbers, but not other areas can lead to misunderstanding and gap between management and workmen, and entailing to a demoralizing culture.

In order to improve, the steering leaders should look into the past for team performance, goals, and strategy they used to achieve the desired goal, this will help to measure the potential of team/ team member potential and align it towards contact centre's goal focusing on the journey, employees enthusiasm, customer experience and other useful metrics.

By avoiding such unrealistic targets you can drive the behavior of your employees the way you want and then numbers and results will eventually follow.

#2 Reflect Dynamic Leadership Characteristics

Leaders are meant to reflect a dynamic personality with their action, words, and behavior. Great leaders bring a sense of belongingness towards the organization, consistent performance, and builds strong core values amongst all levels of employees. Great leaders drive great work culture, you must have often heard, "People do not leave the company, they leave their bosses". Similarly, contact centre's corporate culture evidently depends on the core values, attitudes, and behaviour of employees.

A key to developing and maintain right corporate culture is great leadership at all levels. No organization is created with poor work culture, it is developed gradually via bad leadership and behaviours of the people. Leaders must think beyond numbers, develop a strong internal communication between managers and agents to get maximum results with action plans and other disciplinary.

#3 Invest in Technology & Innovations

Yes, investing in innovations and development in technology is as important as investing in manpower. As new innovations can help your contact agents to work easily and even more efficient. By empowering your employees with the right technology, and innovative strategies it will eventually cultivate a motivated staff, and thus a better customer experience.

#4 Build More Job Opportunities

Create a brand value by integrating inside-out for to promote positive work culture. Encourage calling agents from within by engaging them in extra-curricular activities. Persuade managers to spend quality time with customer service teams and drive employee engagement program.

It has always been believed that working in a call centre cannot offer you good career growth. This perception towards their job is negative and yet, it is difficult for any manager to most of his team and stimulate motivation for the same. No job is without any occupational hazard, every job or occupation has its own set of benefits and challenges. Unfortunately, occupational hazards of a call centre, are publicized out of proportion without highlighting the benefits for the same.

Formulate incentivising career opportunities and make sure your team understands the numerous benefits of this customer calling job, which other job doesn't possess. Also by creating a new job position like more numbers of TL, Team manager, project manager or any given corporate fancy name will not cost much to the company as compared to employee's attrition rate due to "no job growth' and recruiting and training a new employee from square one.

#5 Awards & Recognition

Who doesn't liked to be praised? Obviously, everyone love to get compliments, rewards, recognitions, awards, appreciating notes. Awards and recognition help your employees stay motivated, perform better, and thus achieve targets on time. When a manager can step in to point out your mistakes, then why it becomes difficult to come forward to pat a back of someone who is doing a good job.

When was the last time someone recognized you for doing a great job? How did it make you feel? All recognition, need not be monetary or any financial incentive, it can be in any form a phone call, an appreciating email, motivating cards and so on. These small things bring big returns to the company at large, as each and every employee feels motivated to do better, perform best consistently, aspires other teammates to bring the best in them too.

#6 Happy People Sell More

Happy people tend to spread more positivity around them and they are super influencing personality, and thus they have an ability to sell more and bring more business opportunities.

Keep your customers and clients happy by building a strong link between your customer service efforts and sales gratification. A job in a contact centre is redundant, however by organizing employee engagement activities can stimulate employees to be self-motivated. Doing a job in a contact centre need not be always about grades or ranking, but to do the same job with a different approach, more enthusiasm, and a positive attitude.

#7 Pay High Attention To Customers' Feedback

Overlooking your customers' or clients' feedback is the most harmful for any business. Maintain a secured central database in order to store, track, and monitor each and every channel of communication to leave no possibility of communication gap. Customer' feedback will enable you to rework on your strategy and work delegation areas. Make sure your team takes stern action to rectify or to improve, according to the customers' feedback.

Conclusion …

Unlike technologies and physical amenities, a great contact centre's culture cannot be integrated easily and quickly. Developing a sound corporate culture that reverberates with employees takes years of consistency and thus which cannot be pretended. Once the company employs great work culture, it becomes even more difficult to maintain it and raise its standard higher. Thus, with a conducive environment and right culture, an organization can produce the greatest man resources with a competitive edge.