What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement refers to how strongly employees are committed to working towards their organization's goals and vision. High employee engagement typically manifests itself as increased discretionary effort - engaged employees put more of themselves into their jobs because they are motivated by the promise of organizational success. Employee engagement is not the same as employee satisfaction, which measures happiness. Employees may be perfectly satisfied with just showing up and collecting a paycheck, but not willing to put forth the extra effort that is the hallmark of employee engagement.
Many things contribute to employee engagement, some controlled at the organizational level and others influenced by an employee's manager. Engaged employees believe their work and ideas are valued. They feel the organization communicates with them honestly and transparently. They buy into the organization's goals. Managers can foster employee engagement by creating respectful, trust-based relationships, by developing employees' proficiencies and skills, and by providing growth opportunities. In return, engaged employees will contribute more of their talent to the organization. This is important because studies show that engaged employees positively impact the bottom line and the customer experience.
Employee engagement in the contact center
Employee engagement is critical in contact centers, as agents act as the frontline to your customers. Agents need to be brand ambassadors, which means remaining positive about the organization even in the face of customer issues. Additionally, engaged agents will likely go the extra mile to help customers because they know how important customers are to the company's success. Contact centers that focus on increasing employee engagement are certain to reap substantial rewards.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our performance management and workforce optimization solutions are designed to help contact centers increase employee engagement. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations.
CXone Workforce Optimization products drive employee engagement by making agents active participants in their development, providing real-time insights on their performance, making their jobs more fun and social through gamification and dashboards, and giving them a voice in contact center scheduling and quality processes. Additionally, CXone’s unified and intuitive interface makes agent’s lives easier by streamlining their activities and improving the way they interact with customers. All of these capabilities contribute to higher employee engagement, reduced attrition, and improved customer experience.
CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic call center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.