Engaged employees are more passionate about their work and proactively contribute towards improving a business and its reputation.
In fact, a study from global analytics and advice firm Gallup confirms the strong link between high employee engagement and better business outcomes – across industry and company size – whether in good economic times or bad.
“The contact centre has become instrumental in its contribution to improving the overall experience of customers – both external and internal – to an organisation,” says Shawn Gradwell, Solutions Architect at eNetworks, a Datacentrix company. “And cloud technologies are delivering significant value in this area, specifically for internal customers, by helping to improve employee engagement levels through improved collaboration between team members, important for social interaction and team cohesion.
1. The right tools
Cloud-based contact centre technologies are helping to improve employee engagement in several ways. “Having the right tools in place is an important consideration for better employee engagement,” Gradwell explains. “Cloud solutions can capacitate contact centre employees by allowing them to work effectively from home or from anywhere, maintaining their status as part of the team and keeping them engaged by using technology systems they are motivated to operate.”
2. User friendly interface and workflow automation
Next-generation cloud-based contact centre services create efficiencies that support employees in their work by delivering the service in an easy to use and understandable application that is available on their computers or mobile phones.
Customised workflows can be integrated automatically into existing ERP, CRM and ITSM systems, thereby reducing duplication, manual tasks and errors.
3. Reliable, real-time information
“Another key consideration is the fact that the analytical power and speed of the cloud is unparalleled and has increased the depth of the reporting and visibility across contact centre services. Not only does this empower employees, but real-time statistics bring about greater accountability to the team. Reliable data improves and opens communication in teams, which enhances teamwork and builds trust.”
4. Access to data-driven insights and trends
“Furthermore, cloud technologies deliver live data feeds and complete data-driven insights, enabling management to adapt their business strategies based on trends identified. This also provides managers with an opportunity to stay on top of their teams’ performance and to identify areas for improvement.”
5. Employee coaching
Gradwell goes on to advise that cloud technologies allow for employee coaching opportunities too. “Artificial intelligence (AI) generates a sentiment score on calls made to the service desk. The nature of customer comments in phone calls, text messages, emails, and chat sessions can be properly assessed and used as coaching opportunities for staff to be better kitted to handle various service call situations. Recordings are kept and transcribed automatically to support training initiatives.”
6. Tailored mentoring and recognition
“Supervisors can also provide tailored mentoring to individuals when analysing and comparing scores against the floor’s average. These scores mean that supervisors are more geared to recognise employee performance and express staff appreciation more regularly.”
7. Improved management
Modern cloud contact centre technologies offer users an easy-to-use, intuitive, experience-focused user interface that enables managers and supervisors to change call flows, routing and configuring text-to-speech IVR messages quickly and immediately, without any intervention from IT support or delays while a ticket is queued to an engineer. This permits supervisors to take decisions quickly to improve the performance of the team in each unique situation.
“Consistent employee engagement improves the physical and mental wellbeing of employees,” Gradwell continues. “A well implemented cloud contact centre solution supports employee wellbeing by allowing team leaders to engage more regularly and more meaningfully with employees, from addressing concerns timeously, through changing behaviour, to recognising and rewarding employee performance and more.”
