Improving Agent Engagement

One in a series of "20 Reasons to Host Your Contact Centre in the Cloud"

Employee engagement is usually a significant part of a successful business. Engaged employees are typically more motivated, will actively look for ways to improve the business, will stay with an employer for longer and will be prepared to have a more flexible approach - this is in fact becoming increasingly important in retaining staff as more and more of us seek to improve our work/life balance.

There are a number of ways to measure such engagement, but at the bedrock of most is the provision of the materials that each employee needs to do their job properly and for these materials to be easy to use and be useful to achieve the employee's goals.

Using tools and technology that allow employees some degree of flexibility in achieving their indivdual goals can further increase levels of engagement.

Cloud contact centres, such as ContactWorld, can make a significant difference. First of all, it's a very simple to use interface and it delivers all the information an agent needs to handle a call in the best way.

Secondly, agents can work around other life needs very easily. Agents can log in at home as easily as in the office and work without any interruption from the surrounding environment. The business still has visibility of activity - supervisors can easily see the curent state of an agent, listen to any calls handled that day and check time spent available or taking calls.

This flexibility and implied trust makes it easier to attract, recruit and retain good staff. Whilst there are reporting mechanisms to check agent performance, the overall message of a flexible working policy can be key in the call and contact centre market to recruit and retain key staff.

It also simplifies compliance with HR regulations and policies. This can reduce costs too. Since the top two expenses in a call centre are payroll and office costs, allowing staff to work from home could reduce both. You can offer shorter shifts and split shifts to staff

along with part-time working patterns, confident that you can call on a large pool of agents to meet peak requirements.

Similarly, flexible working means that you can size your call centre accommodation for normal operations rather than have enough workstations for peak requirements.

Download 20 Reasons to Host Your Contact Centre in the Cloud.