Soliciting Feedback From Your Contact Center Staff
If you're a call center manager or supervisor in a customer service or telephone sales work environment, it is highly likely that every day you sit close to a virtual goldmine of data. Contemplate this for a minute. Your customer service employees are in direct communication with the customers of your contact center. By definition, this makes them experts, and therefore, they carry valuable information about what's going on with your customers, vendors, etc. But often that information won't get back to you or to corporate management unless you come up with a method for getting it.
We think the best way to get information from your call center agents is also the simplest: ask them to give it to you. Seeking feedback from your employees regularly gives you useful information about what's going on with them and with your customers. It gives you an opportunity to learn information that might not otherwise come your way. It's also a method by which the agents help you to help them.
You can ask for feedback on many subjects-how they feel about you as their coach, how they feel about their work environment, what suggestions they have for improving their calls and/or work environment, what customers are telling them, and anything else you can think of. By doing this on a regular basis, you tap their brains and take the pulse of the department at the same time. And... you will (over time) get your employees to talk to you freely and comfortably.
Following are some important suggestions:
* Use open questions (questions that elicit more than just a "yes" or "no" response).
* Listen attentively.
* Thank people for their feedback, thoughts, insights, and whatever else they offer you.
* Use different mechanisms to get feedback: ask your employees directly, send out questions via e-mail from time to time, introduce some form of a suggestion box, and so on.
* On occasion, answer a question with a question. For example, when an employee asks for your opinion on something, say, "Well, I'm not sure. What do you think?" When doing this, however, it's important not to come across as flip and not to refrain information that the agent really needs. Once the agent has answered your question, you can give your own recommendation.
Soliciting feedback from contact center staff is a norm in training your contact center management, and is a tried and true method of intelligently managing a contact center.
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