Tips to Keep Your Call Center Reps Motivated and Engaged

Are you a Call Center Manager or Administrator? If so, you are on the front lines of supervising one of toughest and most difficult jobs around: training and motivating your Customer Service Representatives. (Or- as you know them: CSRs.) Your goal: maintain a positive outlook in handling increasingly challenging customer questions and issues. A generation ago, it was much simpler. All your CSRs needed then was a desk, a phone, a headset, and a script, indexed by situation or problem. Today however, things are much more complicated. Your company's programs and offerings combined with credit, return and customer satisfaction issues require that your phone reps be trained to handle a whole host of unique issues. Plus, many United States residents are not native to this country and speak languages other than English. This means you must handle these issues in multiple languages, and insure that the rest of your company has the resources to back up the commitments and promises your Contact Center management or CSRs may make.

Because of these challenges, turnover in Call or Contact Centers has been traditionally very high. The American Teleservices Association, an industry trade group, estimates the national average may be 43% per year for the United States. High customer demands combined with sometimes stressful situations have caused CSR employees to "give up" on the job. Aside from the staffers who may try the job, but are clearly not well suited, how do you prepare, train and equip your phone reps to successfully handle these demands, and at the same time adhere to stated company policy plus maintain a positive outlook about their job?