Workforce Management Featured Article
Why You Need Workforce Management to Keep Your Good Agents
What do you do about the sub-par employee who doesn’t perform poorly enough to garner a firing, yet still misses the quality mark every day? Do you tighten your approach to employee reviews to figure out a way to get rid of the bad seed or just try and make their work life miserable enough that they want to leave on their own accord?
In the course of running a business, I have had great employees, those who are in that sub-par category and those who need to find work elsewhere. In two situations where the employee was soon to be given an exit strategy, each one found other opportunities. This eliminated the need to apply discipline or behavior modification, but it wasn’t necessarily the best approach to workforce management.
Still, it highlighted an area of focus that was taking too much of my time – the underperforming employee. Ours is a fast-paced environment, full of deadlines, customer demands and changing trends. Those who can’t keep pace should be left behind and those who contribute to success should receive the praise – enough of it to stick around. In the contact center, this is critical to keeping costs down, performance up and those in the C-suite happy.
But here’s the challenge – good employees don’t have to stay with a company that doesn’t reward their performance appropriately. They know they are good at their jobs and can easily apply their skills elsewhere. The key to effective workforce management is treating your quality employees like they deserve, rewarding and promoting them whenever possible. This not only communicates that you appreciate their contribution, it also gives them a reason to stick around when the job is hard.
Likewise, good employees can get burnt out, especially in the contact center. It’s tough managing customer interactions all day, especially when that includes the angry customer who cannot be pleased. While contact center leaders don’t have control over the callers, they can create an environment that makes interaction management more rewarding. A supportive environment with strong relationships is a great place to start.
As workforce management solution provider, Monet Software highlighted in a recent blog post, there are benefits to paying attention to these two challenges. When you apply the right resources to keep your good employees and prevent burnout, the result is a better pool of quality agents overall. Everyone on your payroll will benefit from the intentional approach to support, quality interactions and positive feedback. In the end, employees are happy, content to stay put and deliver the quality experience your customers have come to expect.