Nine Best Practices for Enhancing Agent Engagement

The benefits of agent engagement are obvious to any contact center manager or supervisor. Agents who are engaged align their own personal goals with those of the company they work for. The agents strive to do an excellent job, because it makes them feel good to reach the goals set out for them. They perform better and they treat customers better. Engaged agents stick around in your contact center longer, improving your bottom line along with your customer experiences.

As the contact center supervisor, you have the power to develop engaged agents. In a recent NICE Talk, Donna Fluss of DMG outlines nine best practices that get to the heart of nurturing engaged agents.

1. First, use the golden rule: treat your employees like you would treat your customers. Treat them with the respect they deserve, and they will respect you in return.
2. Be proactive. Focus on agent retention rather than agent recruitment. Pay attention to keeping the employees you already have than constantly searching for new ones.
3. Encourage two-way communication between you and agents. Contact centers need to provide appropriate outlets for agents to provide valuable feedback to their supervisors, so that they can know what needs to be improved upon.
4. Offer a variety of career paths for agents. Agents need to see that career development is possible. Offer more paths than just becoming a contact center supervisor, such as a QM specialist, a WFM administrator, an AI administrator, or a robotic process administrator.
5. Support multiple staffing models, meaning, allow agents to work onsite, remote, or a combination of both.
6. Provide options for flexible scheduling. With remote work the new norm, agents want the flexibility to schedule shifts according to their needs.
7. Build a culture dedicated to continuous feedback, coaching, and training. It’s not enough to simply monitor your agents and provide negative feedback. Criticism needs to be presented as personalized coaching, to show that the supervisor and agent are on the same team to help them reach their KPIs.
8. Provide access to personal performance metrics. Allow your agents to see their performance metrics, just like you do. Transparency develops trust and gives them tools to improve their performance on their own.
9. Give timely and meaningful recognition and rewards. Recognition for a job well done boosts morale not just of the recipient, but of the entire contact center.

Most of these points require empathy and emotional intelligence on part of the supervisors and managers, while some can be optimally facilitated with the right technological solution. NICE Performance Management can help with making performance data visible to agents, notifying supervisors which agents need coaching and on what, and provide gamification to develop a healthy sense of competition among agents to improve performance.

We improve organizational effectiveness by monitoring and empowering employee development and engagement to help meet company goals. Why? Because we know that when employees are more engaged, they're feeling more empowered, and they're more likely to help you reach your strategic objectives. And that's when we see growth and positive KPIs happening on the greater scale.

Learn more for yourself about how NICE Performance Management can be the turnkey solution to engage your agents for better performance, enhanced productivity, and ultimately an optimized CX.