Creating an Environment of Proactive Leadership

High agent satisfaction drives contact center employees to stick around and work hard. So, what actually drives high agent satisfaction? According to ICMI, “It turns out that the most reliable drivers of agent job satisfaction are training hours, coaching hours, and the existence of a formal career path.”

Most agents quit because they aren’t properly coached to be successful and confident. They deal with reactive managers who don’t coach and train them to be competent employees, which quickly gets demotivating.

So what characterizes a reactive vs. proactive manager?

A Reactive Manager

• Frantically tries to achieve goals at the end of the month
• Deals with problems as they come
• Will not challenge the status quo
• Doesn’t allocate time to develop employees
• Is unorganized
• Will only try to retain an employee when they are about to quit

A Proactive Manager

• Sets expectations and goals from the get-go
• Thinks long-term with a vision of how and where they hope to take their team
• Maintains consistency with expectations, communication, and discipline
• Is highly organized by tracking and managing activities on one centralized platform
• Challenges the status quo
• Is continuously focused on developing employees
• Works to retain employees from day one
• Tailors coaching to each employee

Managers don’t have to be a one-man-band when it comes to being proactive. They can use technology as their silent sidekick. Strong performance management software will help contact center leaders be proactive by:

• Notifying supervisors with alerts when metrics are close to falling out of objective goals
• Giving agents clear, visual goals through agent-level dashboards
• Tracking agent attributes to prescribe a hiring equation
• Displaying performance goals on Wallboards throughout the contact center
• Using heatmaps to identify call fluctuations before they become a problem
• Automatically generating coaching sessions triggered by performance thresholds
• Automatically incentivizing agents with rewards and recognition for good performance

A proactive leader is always thinking a step ahead of their employees. If an employee doesn’t reach their performance goals, they don’t just shake it off as a ‘bad day.’ They work with the employee to figure out the root cause of the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Providing proactive coaching before agents become discouraged is a key factor in keeping employees motivated and engaged.

Driving engagement with data-driven gamification

Rewards and incentive programs are at the top of the list for driving high satisfaction among contact center agents . Therefore, a consistent gamification strategy should be a key element of your performance management process.

The three main components that every contact center gamification strategy should have are:

A strong performance management process can decrease employee attrition and increase engagement. By doing so, cost savings will increase when it comes to recruiting and training because you simply won't have as many employees to replace. Not only will you experience cost savings, but you should also see an increase revenue because happy agents equal happy customers. 

To learn more about how your contact center can obtain a strong performance management process, check out the white paper “The Top 5 Roadblocks to Contact Center Excellence and how to Break through them with CXone Performance Management.”