Mastering Agent Motivation - BenchmarkPortal

1

Contact Center Management

Mastery Series

Mastering Agent Motivation


Mastery Series

Bruce Belfiore

https://www.benchmarkportal.com/

2


Mastery Series

Contents

2 Mastering Agent Motivation

Unmotivated Agents: The Boulder Chained to Your Management Ankle

The Real Cost of Unmotivated Agents

Motivate with Mentoring and Incentives

3

9

15

Summary 19


3


Mastery Series

Unmotivated Agents: The Boulder Chained to Your “Management Ankle” !

Insight 1

“A center with unmotivated agents is like a boulderchainedtoyour‘managementankle’.Researchpointstounmotivatedagentsloweringproductivityandcustomersatisfaction. And what about your satisfaction andproductivity? Adeepbreath,somecarefulthought,andtargetedactioncancrackthatbouldertopieces.“BruceBelAiore,CEOofBenchmarkPortal

As managers, we are called upon to bring forth the best from our employees. Success comes when those who report to us are willing to fully commit to both our overall mission and our daily objectives. It may seem a small thing, but, in fact, it is a tall order.

Contact center agents who do not feel motivated are agents who do not cooperate in achieving your mission or your objectives. Not only do they withhold discretional effort (i.e. effort above and beyond what’s minimally necessary) they withhold the level of effort that is required to function properly. They sap the efforts of others and become a drag on your plans, on your center’s financials, on your own motivation. Many managers say (or at least think) “I love my job. If only I didn’t have to deal with the HR hassles!”

Well, if you are reading this, you are probably already dealing with these issues. So let’s get into the analysis you need for problem solving.

If this ebook is to be meaningful to you, start by asking yourself frankly: why are some (or all) of the employees who report to you not well-motivated?



4


Mastery Series

Think about your center, your typical employee, your typical caller, your typical customer interactions. Also, think about yourself - - your management style, the training you have received, your assumptions about your people and their capacity for redemption. You must look honestly for patterns and explanations. Don’t be afraid to note shortcomings wherever you see them.

Then parse your unmotivated employees into appropriate sub-groups. Do you recognize any of the following? •  Openly hostile agents are people who don’t like where they are and are

not worried about showing it, at least some of the time. •  Passive-aggressive agents are unmotivated agents who are not openly

hostile. In fact, they may play along and outwardly indicate that they are on board with you and your objectives. However, their actions do not carry through and they frequently disappoint.

•  “Retired-in-place” agents are people who have lost their desire to perform well. They are not particularly hostile, nor even passive-aggressive. They simply don’t care much about your mission or your objectives.

•  Agents who live in a constant state of personal drama, rendering them impervious to the urgent needs of the contact center. They always have an external reason not to focus on accomplishing the work at hand.

Insight 1 Unmotivated Agents: The Boulder Chained to Your “Management Ankle” !

Exercise One You can download the Mastery eBook work sheet HERE . Go to columns A and B. Name and describe the categories that pertain to your center. If you have some special categories of unmotivated employees (short-time students, millennial agents, etc.) then include them as well.

Mastering Agent Motivation Motivation comes from the top!

Get certified through our Management Training!


http://www.benchmarkportal.com/contact-center-manager-certification-training/

http://www.benchmarkportal.com/public/pdf/ebooks/Workbooks/Motivation%20Insight%201.pdf

5


Mastery Series

Now take each category and write down what you think makes them unmotivated in column C. Be very frank. Reach beyond the usual platitudes, and, as indicated above, don’t be afraid to include yourself and your senior management team among the contributing factors. Once you have finished the exercise, look carefully at the list and the reasons. Seek out patterns and try to find insights. Then do your best to think of specific sets of solutions that would migrate each group from the unmotivated to the motivated category. Write these solutions down in column D. As a first stab, put in everything you think would work, whether practical or not. For the sake of this exercise, suspend any desire to simply terminate the problem people. It may well be that you do need to return some employees back to the community, but squeeze your brain cells and think outside the box for ways you might do some HR alchemy and turn your low performers into gold star greats. Note that what you are doing is acting like marketing managers who segment their markets. They parse their market into separate “personas” and then create strategies to reach the minds and emotions of each persona, to elicit desired responses. Are you thinking of them differently now? Can you see how it is your job to get into their skins and find out how to draw out the best in them? You may not have thought of your management job as a marketing job, but it is. The better you do it, the more success you will have.

CategoryName CategoryDescrip1on PerceivedReasonforLackofMo1va1on Solu1ons Iwouldlikeadviceonthis




6


Mastery Series

Our Agents Voices report, which is based on over 5,000 agent surveys, showed that the relationships agents have with managers are paramount to keeping agents engaged and satisfied. In fact, the highest source of satisfaction indicated in all of the categories surveyed was Direct Supervisor/Manager Style: Implicit in these categories is interpersonal communication. If an agent perceives that a supervisor cares about him or her, it is because they talk. Face-to-face. Frequently. In a relaxed, human, friendly way. If there is trust and good working relationship, it is because there is regular exchange of information, opinion, advice on how to improve, etc. In short, there is a real relationship that generates positive feelings.


Please re-read the two preceding paragraphs a second time. Yes, they are very important. Remember your marketing role I mentioned above? We all know good marketers talk to their markets regularly through focus groups, surveys, observations, etc. You should be doing the same thing, every day, with your employees.



https://www.benchmarkportal.com/contact-center-research-reports/

7


Mastery Series

Not all managers do this well, and it shows. In the Agent Voices report, considerably less satisfaction was expressed for items associated with involvement – elements that are key to agent motivation:

Take a mental walk around your center. How many of the people you “see” do you really know? How many of their minds can you read, in terms of what motivates them? Ask yourself: “If I could read more of their minds and hearts, would I be better able to impact their motivation?”


Mastering Agent Motivation Great Coaching Motivates! We can

provide the Roadmap, Don’t Wait


https://www.benchmarkportal.com/contact-center-coaching-for-performance/


8


Mastery Series

Managers must navigate the requirements of company procedures and the desire to provide room for the kind of personal initiative that will create engagement and motivation. Talk about this with your colleagues and your bosses. Find ways to create the space for people to express innovation and find motivation in meaningful ways.

A lot rides on your skills in this regard. Motivation is a mighty and difficult objective. Working well in its absence is nearly impossible – and this says nothing of the expense factor. The costs of unmotivated agents can be very high indeed.

Understanding these dynamics can unchain your “management ankle” from that unwanted boulder faster than you may think. Remember to keep your spreadsheet from this Insight Article handy, so you can refer to it while reading the next two Insight Articles on Agent Motivation.

The next Insight Article in this series will explore the real costs of unmotivated agents, while the third article will provide additional thoughts on how to motivate and mentor your agents – drawing on some other conclusions in the Agent Voices study.





9


Mastery Series


Consider the following in the context of your own center:

•  Unmotivated agents act as poor role models for new hires •  They skew your KPIs (Key Performance Metrics) downward •  They result in higher staffing costs •  They depress morale in the center •  They provide sub-optimal service and lower customer

satisfaction, which lowers repeat business •  They make your life more difficult and keep you from more

productive activities (and make you less happy in general!).

Following on our first Insight (Unmotivated Agents: The Boulder Chained to Your “Management Ankle”), it is important to evaluate and compute the true impact of unmotivated agents on your operations. This is not an exact computation, but it will open your eyes to the impact the problem may be having on your financial, as well as operational, performance.

Insight 2



10


Mastery Series The Real Cost of Unmotivated Agents

Insight 2 Do you recognize your situation in any of these bullet points? If yes, then you are probably thinking “Ouch!” - - and you are right to do so. However, don’t step away because of the pain. This is a monster that must be confronted and conquered. Double down on your discovery process, even if it’s uncomfortable to do so: •  Have you seen an unmotivated, tenured agent squelch the

enthusiasm of a new hire? •  Have you had an exit interview with a fairly new employee who tells

you the atmosphere among some of your team members has contributed to their decision to leave?

•  Have you seen declines in productivity that caused you to increase

your hire rate to be sure you could cover incoming contact volume? •  Have you dealt with unsatisfied callers who complained that the agent

who served them was flat and unhelpful…or worse? Now let’s go a big step further. Let’s take a moment to quantify these items. Read through the following and then link back to the Mastery eBook work book, Spreadsheet 2




11


Mastery Series

·  Look at productivity metrics from all of your agents, and put them in order from top to bottom. For example, take calls per agent per hour over the last 90 or 180 days. If your top agents average 8 calls per hour, and your unmotivated agents average only 5, then you are missing out on almost 38% productivity overall for these agents. The cost of this for a 100 seat center in which 50% are identified as “unmotivated” can be crushing. The following is a simple (and simplistic) calculation for illustrative purposes:

Annual cost per agent (fully loaded): $40,000 Lower productivity from unmotivated agents: 37.5% Cost of unmotivated agents: $15,000 Unmotivated agents: 50 Amount of productivity lost to unmotivated agents: $750,000

·  Negativity effect. Tenured, unmotivated agents can poison the attitudes of newer, more enthusiastic agents. You can create a way to calculate the impact of a decline in motivation over time based on your observations.

Spending some time with this calculator may help you in making significant progress on this item. You may have other productivity calculations that are relevant to your center. Definitely make those calculations, and let me know if I can help in creating a calculator that would serve your situation.

·  Turnover of unmotivated agents. The previous Mastery Series book

on Agent Turnover provides you with a calculator to measure the financial impact of agent turnover. Feel free to go back and look at that again.


Insight 2

Let me pause a moment on the post-training period, since it is a period in which our data shows morale oftentimes declines, and our experience tells us that many managers do not pay enough attention to this important transition time.

Training and Promotions

Mastering Agent Motivation Unmotivated Agents keeping you up at

night? We can help you with that



12


Mastery Series

“Overwhelmingly, respondents reported positive feedback on initial training in terms of preparing them for their positions… The transition period (also called ‘nesting’ in many centers) is rated much less favorably, garnering about half as many ‘strongly agree’ ratings as initial training… …You want the glow of initial training to continue when agents start doing their jobs. Providing a higher level of professional support, a warmer and more welcoming embrace as they face their first customers, and regular tips and feedback might make this phase a more satisfying one for more agents...”

Our analysis of this phenomenon in the Agent Voices report included the following statement:


Insight 2

The Work Environment Other warning signals come from a survey category we call “Work

Environment”, the questions and results of which are shown in the table below:




13


Mastery Series

This category overall did poorly compared with other categories, attracting sub-average scores and raising some notable red flags. The worst metric of the category, “work atmosphere is usually optimistic and positive”, garnered only 22.4% top box and had a troubling Net Score of 44.6%. Perceptions on division of workload also attracted a low Net Score of just at 50.5%. Understaffing is also seen as an issue.


Insight 2

The Work Environment Think about these items in the context of your own center. These questions

may stimulate you to include additional factors in your spreadsheet detailing the perceived reasons for lack of motivation. If so, go with it. The more information you have, and the better your analysis, the more chances you will have of ultimately conquering the problem.



14


Mastery Series

As indicated above, the costs of unmotivated agents are real and may be crippling the center, both operationally and financially. Too many managers assume that this is a normal state of affairs. It should not be. If you would like to discuss interventions that can help you to overcome motivation issues, please let us know. We have seen situations involving dramatic turn arounds of the type that managers love to see. Next we will discuss ways to break off the boulder and free yourself from the impacts caused by unmotivated agents.


Insight 2

Mastering Agent Motivation Are you Hiring the right Agents?

Let us show you what to look for.



15


Mastery Series

Motivate With Mentoring and Incentives

There are dozens of ways to approach this problem, but we will focus on three here: Selection, Mentoring and Incentives. Selecting the right people to populate your center is half the battle. Some centers are so desperate to put bodies in cubicles that they do a poor job of recruiting and screening. Do not short-circuit best practices in this area. Create a comprehensive job description for the rep position with your team. Let it marinate for a couple of days on your desk or in your computer, and make refinements to the wording as you carry on your daily tasks and observe carefully what your reps actually do. Include two important elements: skills needed and optimal personal characteristics.

The previous two Insight Articles on Agent Motivation helped you to define the problem of unmotivated agents in terms of your center, and in terms of financial costs. This third article is focused on solving the problem, and breaking the chain that binds you to it.

Insight 3



16


Mastery Series

Once you and your team are satisfied that the job description effectively captures what you are looking for, be sure it is properly utilized in your recruiting efforts. Incorporate elements of it it into your print, Website and online outreach. If you have an employee referral program (I highly recommend that you consider this) then be sure your employees have this information in hand. Then screen candidates efficiently and effectively. Benchmark their resumes against your job description. Have them take skills and personality tests that are geared toward your job description, and stick to your standards. Administer telephone interviews before inviting them for an on-site interview. Do the recommended (but sometimes forgotten) background check on candidates who make it through the gauntlet. No current hiring process is 100% guaranteed, but a well-structured process that includes these best practices will position you to bring in people who are properly motivated and equipped to perform at high levels. Mentoring is also very important. I have suggested that managers consider changing the title “supervisor” to “agent advocate” or “agent mentor”. Think about that for a moment. “We are having an Agent Advocate meeting this afternoon to try to address the issue of under-motivated agents.” Wow! This simple change of title turns the whole job on its head, but it is a change that should have very positive results for you. A supervisor, by definition, overseas and maintains policy and discipline. A mentor or advocate is someone who develops agents to be the best they can be. If your center is suffering with low motivation, it is likely that your supervisors are not high energy, nurturing, agent advocates and mentors. You, as their manager, need to bring them over to the mentoring side by communicating a clear vision and by providing detailed training on how they become master mentors.

Insight 3 Motivate With Mentoring and Incentives



17


Mastery Series

Now for a spotlight on you. Are you the mentor that you should be, especially for your supervisors (or “agent advocates”)? Link over to work sheet 3 in the eBook work book Here. Write down all of the things that you do that fit into the category of mentoring in column A. Then write down the additional things you could be doing to be a better mentor for your direct reports in column B. Then, in column C, indicate a date by which you intend to implement the things indicated in Column B. Look at this sheet every few days and determine if you are making progress toward your goals. If you need training or assistance to accomplish this, get it. We would be happy to talk to you about Management Leadership Courses, or you can find another offering in the market. However, get the training you need. On your journey toward a highly motivated center, it is very important to be able to demonstrate leadership and to gain the trust of your people. Below are some illuminating data from the Agent Voices Report:


The ultimate goal of great leadership is to have a productive workplace that is properly staffed and designed to foster positive morale and productivity. The results here indicate that, in many cases, management, including supervisors, can do more to ensure that work is distributed equitably, and to infuse their workplaces with an upbeat atmosphere on a daily basis.





18


Mastery Series

Incentivizing your colleagues is a huge topic. We can only touch upon it here, but it is an important area for you to think about - - especially think about what you are not doing currently. In the call center space there are many incentives that cost little or nothing. Competition for points, for small prizes, for badges etc. Many agents love monthly meetings in which games are played and ribbons or gift certificates are awarded for superior performance – the kind of performance that clearly indicates high motivation


Incentives can also be baked into the compensation plan. If the plan is well- structured, fair, and well-communicated, it will have a major impact on motivation. As they think about incentivizing colleagues, managers need to communicate positive messages continually. For some managers, this comes naturally. Others need to pump themselves up and fill themselves with extra energy before they go around the floor or start a team meeting. Some have a quieter demeanor that, nonetheless, agents find reassuring, positive and inspiring. Managers must find what works for them and what works for their center to boost and maintain agent motivation.


Agents not buying into your Management? Need answers?

Let us help you find them



19


Mastery Series


In summary, it is important to understand the roots of the motivation problem (Insight 1), quantify the costs of the problem (Insight 2), and write down a plan to conquer it that includes selection, mentoring and incentives (Insight 3) - - so that you can unshackle yourself from the boulder of unmotivated agents. This comprehensive approach goes beyond the one-off "Tip of the Day" way of thinking about this serious issue. It organizes the up-front discovery, the thoughtful analysis, and the hard-headed identification and implementation of solutions into a structured process that provides the best chances for success. Recall that this is measurable success - - improvements that can be seen in metrics and converted into money saved and dollars earned. It is success that can be calculated and proudly presented to your senior managers at the end of the year. If you would like to chat about how we can help with this process, just let us know. After all, you want that boulder off of your ankle now!

Summary



20


Mastery Series

20

Benchmark Portal is the global leader in Call Center Benchmarking, Certification, Training and Consulting. Since its beginnings in 1995 under Dr. Jon Anton and Prof. Richard Feinberg of Purdue University, Benchmark Portal has grown with the contact center industry and now hosts the world’s largest call center metrics database. Now led by Bruce Belfiore, the Benchmark Portal team of professionals has gained international recognition for its call center expertise and innovative approaches to best practices for the call center industry. BenchmarkPortal’s activities include The College of Call Center Excellence™, a leader in call center training, and CallTalk™, the first on-line talk show specifically focused on the call center industry. Benchmark Portal also hosts Call Center Campus Week. This annual, unique call center industry event presents attendees the latest in practical research plus the tools and inspiration to drive their call centers’ performance to the top. Our mission is to help customer contact managers in all sectors to optimize their centers in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Visit us at BenchmarkPortal.com

Your SOURCE for Contact Center Success. We bring results!




Documents

Mastering Agent Motivation - BenchmarkPortal