Encouraging the Right Behavior for Greater Customer Satisfaction
Having the right data can make or break organizations that rely on phone communication with their customers. The need for collaboration between disparate phone systems and reporting systems goes beyond what most phone manufacturers offer to measure the customer experience. The integration between Mitel (ShoreTel) and Brightmetrics tools allows clients greater visibility into their phone system and the data available to them, which has the power to transform business processes and team performance. This technique is known as “Gamification”, and it’s all about encouraging the right employee behavior.
Contact Center Gamification
Ken Eklund, American game and experience designer, says “If you make a game about something that matters, your “players” will want to participate in that larger discussion. If you genuinely make that participation meaningful in the game, it can also be meaningful in real life.” When you have real-time data, you gain a more casual way to use self-management, good-natured taunting and team encouragement as a way to improve the end customer experience. Whether you are thinking of implementing a formal Gamification program or just wanting to encourage better results from your team, the key in both scenarios is having the right data available to encourage a gaming environment.
A healthy organization approaches Gamification with the underlying benefits in mind:
- Unifying the team’s vision while gaining a sense of both group accomplishments towards tangible goals
- Appreciation of individual contributions towards those goals.
When you display feedback and progress in real time (instead of waiting for reviews and reports) the organization can build a sense of teamwork and accomplishment throughout the workday, which maximizes progress and helps to establish tactical and strategic priorities. The most important thing is to leverage data in a way that incentivizes employees to provide the customer experience your organization desires.
Self-Motivated Employees: Recipe for Success
There are always a few outstanding employees who consistently outperform their peers. The information gained from performance data helps identify the behaviors these key performers exhibit and helps managers get the best results from all their employees. It’s a ‘lead by example’ situation that is fostered through healthy competition. The right call metric software and integration can help you determine these behaviors with metrics such as:
- Queue Times
- Abandon Rates
- Transfer Rates
- Answer Percentage
- Available and Busy Hours
For example, if an outstanding performer tends to spend more time on the phone with customers, that person’s results show up in real time and allow the supervisor to focus on training for that agent to perform to that of his/her peers.
Dashboards – Data that Make Sense to You
Nothing is more compelling than a visual representation of progress. When you have easy to use templates and dashboards, you can provide at a glance, insights into your team and allow them to see what is working and what is not. Brightmetrics provides standard templates that allow your team to see how they are performing, all day long. It steers them towards success and allows them to choose to self-select to tweak their performance for better results.
It’s also important to take perspective into account when setting up your dashboards. Metrics like Abandon Rate may be a valuable insight into management but may not motivate your staff as much as Percentage Calls Answered by Hour.
Another key element may be including historical data. Showing your players how they are doing today compared to another timeframe may give them a sense of accomplishment and push them harder to make further improvements. The key factor in all of this is transparency.
Democratize Access to Data
When you make your analytics transparent, you remove any false notions and bring wasted efforts to light. It’s simply lean, honest thinking that allows your teams to be as fruitful and conscientious as possible. Seeing a complete picture in real-time helps your staff modify ineffective behaviors and mimic successful ones throughout the workday. Real-time dashboards can be a catalyst to your team’s success.
For example, if you have a goal such as making 50 calls a day, you can tell your employees at the end of the day whether or not they hit that mark, but it is far more motivating to allow them to see a progression throughout the day. They will certainly be more motivated when they can see not only their numbers but their team members’ numbers as the day progresses. It is this combo of healthy competition and self-monitoring that allows your employees to put their best foot forward. It’s all about communication.
Application integration can deliver on the promise of unified communications by bridging the gaps between organization communications, core business processes, CRM, ERP and applicant tracking systems. These are your instruments for gathering business intelligence; when put together these tools can create a symphony of success. They tie together call record data, customer account information and activity trends to release your true productivity potential.
Improved customer satisfaction is a result of increased productivity, reduced response times, and employee collaboration, which equates to more efficiency and thus, more profit. Mitel’s support of open standards such as Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) offers customers greater flexibility to integrate business process applications with their business communications systems. This allows further visibility for system administrators and end-users alike.
Miss the Webinar on Gamification, Listen Now:
The goal of every call center manager is to figure out how to motivate agents to provide a premium level of customer service, let Packet Fusion show you how Brightmetrics can transform your call center into a fun and competitive environment that pushes the quality of service to the next level. Learn more about how you can unify your team and glean the best possible goals through Gamification.
As CEO of Packet Fusion, Matt sets the tone and vision for our company and our customers. His 20+ years in telephony gives him a deep understanding of unified communications and collaboration technology. He is an engaging presenter and has a knack for breaking down the often over complicated VoIP technologies into plain and simple English. Outside of PFI, Matt’s happy place is on the golf course or on a bike ride with his daughters.