It goes without saying that agents are the backbone of every contact center operation—driving more sales, meeting customer expectations, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, and, overall, representing your brand. But, all these aspects are directly related to one thing that many contact center managers can sometimes overlook—the agent experience.
Poor agent experience can lead to many major consequences—from burned-out employees to high turnover rates, which the industry is already notorious for. However, that doesn’t have to be the case for you!
In this article, we collaborated with our partner ContactCenterWorld to share 5 unique best practices on how to improve agent experience—all gathered from award-winning contact center managers from around the world!
So fasten your seatbelts and get ready for some serious note-taking!
Industry best practices from around the world for better agent experience
Would you believe us if we told you that BCA (Bank Central Asia) contact center has an astonishing turnover rate of merely 1%!
Nugroho Agung Prasetyo, Manager at BCA, has a secret to this success, and we’re about to share his and many other successful contact centers’ secrets with you!
BCA | Bank Central Asia
ContactCenterWorld’s 2021 Best Contact Center Design Award Winner BCA believes that what we build, builds up our behavior—literally. Therefore, they have a major focus on the outer and interior design of their buildings to create a healthy human-building interaction.
This interaction is a combination of 3 important criteria:
- Visual appeal
- Function
- Touching the mind and soul
With special care shown to details, ergonomic workspaces, an interior design that feels like home, and iconic “Instagramable” spots throughout the building, BCA contact centers constitute a happy workplace where:
- Happiness has a multiplying effect,
- Stress leaves its place to productivity,
- Creativity and inspiration is sparked, and
- Agents are genuinely happy.
MassMutual | Financial Services
How can you drive your agents to achieve their KPIs, increase customer satisfaction, and be more productive without breathing down their necks and pushing them out the door? Here’s how!
MassMutual created a gamification program built into their dashboard where agents collect points for certain KPIs such as AHT (Average Handle Time) and schedule adherence.
These points are not only tokens of appreciation—but they also can be used in MassMutual’s marketplace. Because of the pandemic, the company has shifted to working from home, but that doesn’t mean that those points don’t count.
Agents can still shop from the marketplace as the company uses Amazon Prime to ship the items directly to their homes. What a flex, right?
RDI | Global BPO
How can a BPO with thousands of contact center agents ensure happy, motivated, and healthy agents? RDI, ContactCenterWorld’s 2021 Best Employee Wellness Program Award Winner, has the answer for you!
RDI believes their greatest asset is their people, so they created an awesome engagement and wellness philosophy called ELLWELL—Earn Well, Learn Well, Live Well.
With various programs created to serve this philosophy, one that caught our eye is their virtual monthly fitness challenge called Moving Smart!
Each month showcases another theme challenge—our favorite is their July 2021 Olympics— and as they have 257 currently active members, hundreds of new agents partake in these challenges each month.
They also post their weekly workouts on social media and their weekly newsletter. All these are just the perfect way to promote employee wellness and offer agents a reason to stick around.
Tokopedia | Technology Solutions Provider
At Tokopedia, agents are called Nakama, which means colleague, compatriot, friend, or comrade.
During the beginning of the pandemic, many businesses and contact centers were clueless about what to do. However, Tokopedia was the first company that successfully applied a 100% working from home policy to all their contact center Nakamas with 0% disruptions, 2 weeks before the government issued a lockdown.
Muhammad Faiz Munandar, Communication and Service Associate at Tokopedia, believes that their 7+1 pillars of employee wellness were the key to this success:
- Physical Wellness
- Intellectual Wellness
- Social Wellness
- Emotional Wellness
- Financial Wellness
- Spiritual Wellness
- Environmental Wellness
- A Gate Keeping System
Why? They had a perfectly functioning program in place which they were able to easily adapt to the new requirements of an era of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity).
For instance, to ensure Nakamas’s mental wellness throughout these difficult times, Tokopedia shifted their Emotional Wellness Program into a 2-phase implementation:
Prevention of mental disruption: online mental health seminars, online meditation classes, etc.
Support&Treatment of mental disruption: expanding health benefits to cover mental health treatments, online support groups supervised by a health practitioner, etc.
These implementations created a great impact in helping their Nakama’s cultivate remote working, handle stress, avoid burnout, and remain productive and motivated.
ONQ | Medical Billing Outsourcing Contact Center
When you start a new job, it’s normally on a Monday where you start your onboarding by enrolling in the company’s training program, right? Not at ONQ!
Sean Hammerle, Chief Operations Officer at ONQ and ContactCenterWorld’s 2021 Best Contact Center Executive/Director Award Winner, has 10 tips to ensure agents feel like family—and his first tip is to ensure everyone shares the same core values. So, Monday is the day where new hires are introduced to ONQ’s corporate philosophy, or as they call it, Family Feel!
Sean also states that executives and directors are the head of the family.
“I helped start this company 8 years ago. And to this day, I’ve really pushed being on time and never been late because I am not going to ask my employees to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself,” he says, pointing out the importance of leading by example.
Sean has 9 more tips on how to guarantee success with a team of agents that feel like family—just like how Tokopedia has more to tell on how they adapted their entire Wellness Program to the pandemic and how RDI is using its ELLWELL Program to enhance agents’ overall experience.
All of them will be presented at ContactCenterWorld’s 16th Annual Next Generation Contact Center & Customer Engagement Best Practices Event, where top-ranking contact centers from 80 countries will share best practices on:
- Customer Experience & Loyalty,
- Employee Engagement Tactics,
- Social Media Management,
- Contact Center Operations,
- Business Leadership, and
- Winning Sales, Marketing, and Service Strategies.
The best part is, we have a $200 discount code*—J2022—exclusive for Call Center Studio blog readers! The event will be held online, creating a great opportunity to not only discover valuable insight but to network with industry professionals too!
Looking for a little competition? 2022 Global ContactCenterWorld awards are open for any companies wishing to compete against the best in the world, enroll today!
What next?
Ready to create your own best practice story? Call Center Studio is here to help!
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*applies on full (3-day) attendance to the event
