No one can sit in a cubicle for eight straight hours, focusing on a single task. Distraction is a common thing in the offices. However, sometimes, it leads to procrastination, directly affecting your operations. The phone support team has to stay on their feet as customer communication is not something you can take lightly.
When you are focused, it translates to sales. You have to stay active as a customer can reach out anytime with an issue. To increase your performance and positively affect the company’s bottom line, call agents have to handle people with undivided attention.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to motivate agents as different things trigger different agents. For instance, some can focus on building a relationship, whereas others might want to learn about their organizational growth. This blog highlights the main ways to motivate phone reps for seamless operations.
Techniques to Motivate Your Phone Support Reps:
- Define Targets and Expectations for Agents
- Push Your Team with Defined Career Goals
- Form a Meaningful Connection
- Celebrate Your Team’s Achievements
1. Define Targets and Expectations for Agents:
One of the main reasons behind employees feeling disconnected is the lack of an end goal. The support team does not know what it is working toward and often feel lost during the rising working load. Reps usually lose sight of the bigger picture, which is the purpose of their effort.
Guess what helps? Setting goals for your team. You do not want to provide them with years-long objectives but manageable ones to help them achieve the target. Team leads can break them into weekly or monthly targets, updating agents with ongoing performance.
So having a clear and defined goal is what pumps up employees. Let’s take a look at some of the things when setting goals:
- Finding a solution will motivate your agents to think out of the box and work together. So have a solution-oriented approach rather than only highlighting the mistakes.
- Having your team working closely with you makes them feel engaged and involved. Your team is working to achieve the target, so having them close makes sense.
- Do not set targets that are difficult to achieve. You do not want your reps to feel discouraged and blame the work environment when failing to achieve overly-demanding targets.
- Managers should celebrate any target your phone agents achieve. This will let them know that what they do is appreciated and that they can do better with constructive feedback.
If you think you do not have enough time to do everything mentioned above, consider phone support outsourcing. Service providers are responsible for the team and take out activities to keep them boosted for your operations. So, let your outsourcer handle your support team while you take care of other important business aspects.
2. Push Your Team with Defined Career Goals:
You are setting target goals for your sales, but where does it talk about your team? Does it say your team reward from it? Your phone agents need to see what closing a deal will reap for them. The lack of a defined career path will discourage them, decreasing your productivity overall.
Understanding your employees’ personal and professional goals will lead to a better work environment. TLs should work with executives to design a scalable team system. So, the organization’s leaders can review the progress simultaneously and assess the workforce with clearly-defined KPIs.
Business owners admit that ongoing feedback and check-ins are crucial in yielding desired results. Your team will know that you value their efforts and also provide them with a platform to hone their skills and reach their goals with your company. Business outsourcing solutions are experts in defining KPIs and reviewing analytics to boost your team’s productivity. So, outsource your back-office processes to find more time for making your call center better.
3. Form a Meaningful Connection:
Communication is the key to every business. There are setbacks in not communicating with your team; as a result, there will be no collaboration. It requires trust between employees and executives. It is more crucial when it comes to handling customers. If your phone support team has a strong connection, it will show through your customer satisfaction.
When your agents have trust in your company, you will experience various things, such as:
- Reduced stress level
- Higher productivity
- Active representatives
- Boosted engagement
- Less agent burnout rate
Companies need to understand the thought and feelings of their workers and should value them as they value numbers. You can have connections with individuals as well as your entire team. You decide what type of business you want to be, and the company that appreciates its workforce does better than its competitors.
Only 39% of phone support agents claim to be supported by their company. So it would be best to show your workforce that you care for them and trust their skills. As a result, you will have an open and honest workplace where everyone is welcomed, retaining their individuality for greater effect.
4. Celebrate Your Team’s Achievements:
To motivate your phone support team completely, managers should recognize and celebrate their achievements. When employees know they are appreciated, they put more heart into their work. If you are among the businesses that deal in 24/7 answering service, you need to highly motivate your night shift as it is not easier and quite demanding to work late.
Many reps have expressed to quit a job upon not receiving appreciation for their work. Avoid appreciating in a cliché way but rather use creative ways to leave an impression on your employees. An increment is a token of gratitude but managing the work/life balance is paramount. Following are the things you can use to show appreciation to your team:
- Managing your employee’s personal/professional life will show that you care. Your agents will be more motivated knowing that you respect their personal life and are flexible.
- Another way to boost your team’s morale is to gift them care packages. Giving them goodies also reflects your thought behind appreciation.
- Simplicity is the best policy. Sometimes, using words like thank you can make a huge difference. So show gratitude to let them know you admire their efforts.
- One of the best ways is to spend time with your team. Go to a restaurant or celebrate some closing deals as a gesture of appreciation.
The phone call answering team need to stay level-headed to handle customer efficiently. So, it is the responsibility of team leaders to keep the team boosted for higher CSAT and retention scores.
Hire Highly-Trained Phone Support Agents with DOS:
You are the best person to understand and motivate your team. The in-house team comes with various responsibilities. You need to keep your team optimal for seamless operations. It is imperative when it concerns your customer support department, especially call support services. Want to save you from all the hassle? Contract out your phone and other support services to a third party. Digitech Outsourcing Solution (DOS) saves you from all the management hassle with its own team of experts.
You do not need to micromanage your team as we are here. Our phone agents are trained well and prepared in line with the latest trends. The time you spend managing the team can now be utilized on your other core operations. In addition, we work round the clock, eliminating the need for night staff. Want to experience comfort? Sign up for our free trial version! You will find out that we also offer multilingual reps that handle your international clients, catering to all time zones.
