The sad truth is that many of your customer service reps don’t really care about your goals, but giving up on them is the last thing you’d want to do.
Few business owners would ever want to admit that their relationship with their customer support agents isn’t perfect. Primarily, this is because you and your employees are chasing different goals. They’re concerned mainly about making a living for themselves and carving out a lucrative career, whereas managers are more focused on increasing your company’s profits.
The best that you can do, therefore, is to promote an ownership mentality. That means making your people see the value of your business goals in order to persuade them to support your missions. But even this can be difficult to do.
To bridge this gap, you need to reach out to your people and build real connections with them. Here are culture-changing tips to get your customer support agents to see things from your point of view.
1. Make everyone feel important.
Every single job within your company is important. Each task, no matter how minuscule it seems, contributes something to the realization of your goals.
You, as the business owner, must take the initiative to make your agents realize that their job matters just as much as everybody else’s. If your employees feel like they can be easily replaced, they also won’t bother to devote their best abilities to enhance the quality of your services.
What you’ll get in return from making employees feel important is higher productivity and dedication.
2. Establish daily goals.
Your agents may feel overwhelmed if you discuss your major customer service goals with them right away. But if you break them down into smaller objectives that they can fulfill every day, they’ll easily understand how they can help reach your goals.
Plus, this will also remind them that the entire team is working hard together for the company’s most important missions. Aside from promoting teamwork, strategies like this would help you build a goal-oriented organizational culture.
3. Provide careers, not jobs.
Employee engagement decreases when workers feel like they’re trapped in the office. This could happen when they keep doing the same things over and over and they’re not being given new opportunities to grow, excel, and utilize the full range of their skills.
Challenging your agents and giving them chances to take on much bigger roles in the call center can greatly increase their drive to work. It also shows that you’re willing to invest in their professional growth, which would strengthen their commitment to the company.
4. Let them fail.
Handling irate callers is stressful enough, and you should try not to fuel your employees’ frustrations any further. Instead, focus on creating a positive organizational culture. This means letting your customer support agents make mistakes and encouraging them to learn from their own lapses.
However, you do have to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable mistakes. Finding the perfect balance can be tricky at first, but with careful planning, you’ll be able to come up with a performance management strategy that works for your employees.
