8 Ways to Solve the Employee Engagement Puzzle

Maddy Hubbard at Alvaria outlines eight ways to solve the employee engagement puzzle.

To have a superior customer experience, organizations must have an equally compelling employee experience. In order to be truly customer-centric, you must first become employee-centric. Keeping employees engaged is a conundrum.

Understanding how to engage contact centre employees is paramount to solving this objective. Embracing gamification technology can make this a reality.

Keep reading for eight ways to solve the employee engagement puzzle:

1. Reinforce Corporate Vision, Mission & Brand

No one likes to be a cog in the wheel. Contact centre agents are no different. They want company leadership to communicate the corporate vision, mission and brand to all employees and be reminded on a regular basis from their supervisors.

2. Create a Sense of Belonging

Reinforce corporate goals through individual agent KPIs and reward through game mechanics. This creates a sense of community and belonging, reflects an agent’s personal value to the company and builds engagement and loyalty over time.

Increasing investments in employee engagement by 10% can increase profits by $2,400 per employee per year. — Talent Culture

3. Provide Ongoing Training

Regular training in the contact centre — focused on soft skills, compliance, new products and services and best practices — is essential to helping agents improve performance. Group training may be most appropriate for initial sessions.

But gamification is ideal for ensuring and rewarding ongoing adherence on a consistent basis.

4. Feel-Good Factor

When agents recognize that an investment and effort is being made in their development it makes them feel good about the company — which often carries over into their interactions with customers.

5. Present Clear Goals & Expectations

Nothing is more demotivating than being unsure about what is expected of you or having the goal posts constantly moved. Be sure that each employee is clear about their individual key performance indicators (KPIs) and the critical role they play in achieving the overall department and corporate goals.

6. Psychological Incentivizing

Gamification is an excellent solution for reinforcing individual KPIs by either triggering specific activities or notifications to boost performance or giving kudos and recognition when goals are met.

7. Deliver Consistent, Personalized Feedback

Gamification can be personalized for each agent based on the specific areas they need to work on and the progress they have already made. When supervisors meet with agents, coaching time can be more productive because all the performance data is at their fingertips.

Teams with high employee engagement rates are 21% more productive than those with low engagement. — Gallup

8. Cultivate Team Spirit

Being part of a team can be a powerful motivator. It fosters collaboration, builds bonds beyond work and encourages healthy competition. With gamification, employees can see their individual rankings, team rankings, and even department and location rankings.

It’s a great way for them to feel part of a group and have some fun while learning new skills and becoming a top performer.

Improved Business Performance: The End Goal of Engagement

Solving the employee engagement puzzle is critically important to your business for improved business performance. Companies with highly engaged workforces simply perform better than those without. Significantly better.

According to Gallup, those in the top quartile demonstrated a 17% improvement in productivity, a 20% improvement in sales, and a 21% improvement in profitability over those in the bottom quartile.

Author: Guest Author