What to Include in Your Daily Briefing Sessions or Virtual Huddles

We investigate what should be included in daily briefing sessions or virtual huddles, as well as highlighting the best ways to run these sessions remotely.

Key Things to Include in Your Daily Briefings

You can run energetic daily briefings remotely, in the contact centre and with your outsource partners (if applicable). But contact centres can shy away from them, suggesting that they don’t have the investment time.

Natalie Calvert

Yet, as Natalie Calvert, founder of CX High Performance, once told us: “When you are running a daily briefing or virtual huddle – and do it well – they can make a significant difference to the day’s results, employee retention and communication.”

But what sorts of things should we be communicating in our daily briefings? Let’s take a look…

Top Priorities of the Day

What can your team do to delight customers today? Talk about your key objectives, make them sound achievable and inject energy into your team’s performance.

If you’re finding that more customers are unhappy over the past week, rattle off some quick tips to help them deal with angry customers. Get them in the zone and start the day off on the right foot.

Company Updates

Make sure agents feel like they are a central cog within the organization’s machine.

What’s going on within the wider company? Update the team and make sure agents feel like they are a central cog within the organization’s machine.

You can do that by quickly highlighting how their role is helping the company to meet its core objectives, so employees feel like their work has a purpose. This is a great motivational tool.

New Product/Process Announcements

Is there a new product being released? Or is there a process change? Articulate how these things might impact the agent role and give the team a chance to voice their thoughts.

Also think about whether marketing have released a new promotion in the morning and consider what customers are likely to be asking. This can help your advisors better prepare for the day.

Employee Recognition

Celebrate the wins. When a customer gives an agent a really good bit of feedback, shout it out in your daily briefings – spread the cheer of the little wins by celebrating as a team.

Also, give shout-outs to employees that score consistently good quality scores, show great improvements and do nice things for the team culture.

Spreading some cheer is a great way to start the day.

For more advice on how to recognize good performance, read our article: Top 10 Ways to Show Agents They’re Appreciated

Performance Pledges

When you have a good coaching conversation with an agent, document some “performance pledges” (in their own words). This drives accountability for improving performance.

To further drive this accountability, get the team member to step forward and state that pledge to the group, while also sharing good points that were highlighted in the coaching session – to not only focus on areas of improvement, but also spread good energy.

A Stand Up and “Shout Out” Section

Open up the floor for the team to quickly state what they are working on and how that helps to contribute to the company goals. Get everyone in the zone!

Don’t shout out things like: “Who wants to swap this shift with me?”

Just make sure that agents don’t shout out things like: “Who wants to swap this shift with me?” That doesn’t need everybody’s attention and can be a waste of their time.

Reiterate the Service Delivery Vision

If you have a service delivery vision, reiterate that towards the end of your daily briefing session. This will help to get everyone motivated behind a purpose of helping customers.

While this is only a simple statement – a service delivery vision describes exactly what kind of service you aim to deliver – it never hurts to reiterate your key values!

Contact centre expert Daniel Ord discusses the power of a service delivery vision in our article: Call Centre Quality Assurance: How to Create an Excellent QA Programme

Power Poses

One way in which the FatFace contact centre end their morning briefing session is to strike a power pose, where everyone makes as big a stance as possible.

By getting everyone on their feet and making a power pose, we can utilize the power of positive body language that instils confidence and gets people in a positive frame of mind for the rest of the day.

6 Golden Rules for Successful Daily Briefings

Now we know what to include in our daily briefings, let’s make sure we’re getting the format of our daily briefing sessions right.

1. Don’t Lose Sight of Your Purpose

Avoid general discussion and problem solving, as people will turn off. Successful team briefings are engaging and have a purpose which you must deliver on.

2. Keep Your Briefings to Between 2 and 15 Minutes

Bring everyone together for a short amount of time, rather than having separate briefings between teams, and make sure that every shift has a huddle, to ensure that messages are passed on clearly and uniformly.

3. Get Everyone on Their Feet (Even Remotely)

Getting people on their feet adds energy to the conversation as it gets people out of their seats – which they will be sitting in for potentially hours – while it helps to keep things short and sweet, as some people can get uncomfortable standing for a long time.

4. Bring in the Board

As the leader, get a board behind you and write down your key points to emphasize. This helps to make your key ideas stick in people’s brains.

5. Keep It to a Set Time of Day

If you want to boost performance, engagement and communication at the start of every day, set a time for a briefing, early in the advisor shift, to set the tone for the rest of the day.

6. Keep It Energetic

If you want to set the right tone at the start of every day, you need to centre your briefings around pace, energy and inspiration. They are not about ad hoc stuff, they’re about focus and bringing the team together.

For more great ways to motivate your contact centre team, read our articles:

Author: Jo Robinson

Published On: 13th Jan 2021 - Last modified: 16th May 2024
Read more about - Call Centre Management, Communication, Natalie Calvert, Team Management