In order to build a successful call center and boost your call center incentive, you have to start with hiring people who are passionate advocates of your brand. It is important to hire people who have a connection or passion for the products or services you sell, and people who gain deep satisfaction and gratitude from helping others. Of course, don’t forget to make your training fun and inspiring. Boost your call center incentive by connecting the job to the company’s core values.

With every new hire that you pick, conduct training that makes it easy to learn and improve on the job. Don’t’ forget to implement procedures that empower agents to take care of customers and deploy tools and technology that reduce cognitive load and allow them to focus on solving customer inquiries.

Within the surveys conducted last year 77% of agents surveyed indicated that hands-on training and shadowing are the most effective training methods.

Boosting Your Call Center Incentive Program through a Great Company Culture

In order to create a culture of caring for customers across your company, it is important to focus on all levels. For example, get executives to listen to calls side-by-side with agents and turn the leadership of your company into advocates for the voice of your brand. Your agents are the most important part of your brand.

One way of boosting your call center incentive and teaching your employees to care about your customers is to create a reward program. Of course that it goes a long way if you recognize and reward the hard and sometimes thankless efforts that these frontline workers perform every day, In order to build a successful call center incentive program, you have to remember your call center agents at all times. Shine a light on them, and make them feel valued.

It is often overlooked by company leaders the value of your call center employees. The leaders might sometimes seem to think of their call center people as warm bodies that temporarily occupy chairs to take orders, set up appointments, etc. They are at times seen as interchangeable and ultimately disposable. This is a sign of bad company culture and it leads toward lowering the call center incentive.

In this scenario, there is typically little interaction between the call center staff and their coworkers. Then no wonder that call center turnover is typically high. These leaders don’t bother investing in call center employees because they think agents will leave anyway. This is not the right way to go about this as it creates a vicious circle that hurts the company and agents. When the company treats agents as disposable they will lose call center staff.

It is important to keep in mind that call center agents are the face of the company to customers and treat them accordingly. Happy employees make for happy customers. Your call center employees are likely the first person your customers are speaking to.

Your managers and your employees in HR know that employees who are happy and engaged are more productive on the job. Call center incentive is a serious topic. Call center agents who are content because their basic needs are met will deliver a better experience when they’re interacting with customers. This is why it’s a good idea to think about what challenges your call center team faces and look for ways to address them to improve focus.

Prevent Isolation

There is a common mistake that companies make, which is to treat the call center almost as if it were a separate, less important part of the business. In these cases, there is little to no interaction between call center employees and colleagues in other business units. Sadly, this leads to the steps the company takes to create a cohesive culture, like professional development, team-building exercises, social events, and similar, not to apply to the call center.

This is why it is important to integrate your call center into the rest of the business. This makes for a better approach. In turn, it will provide opportunities for mixing that can pay huge dividends in process improvement and product development efforts. It is advisable to make sure the call center team shares in the benefits their colleagues in other units enjoy, including competitive compensation and benefits programs and incentive, plans to reward great performance.

Put People First

For boosting your call center incentive don’t forget that your people are what make your business successful. This is why it is important to recognize the importance of the role everyone plays and create a people-first culture to reward them and support their efforts. When your call center people qualify leads, answer customer questions about products, set up demos and similar they are also making a first impression of your company with customers.

If you need energetic, knowledgeable, focused, and satisfied call center people that will make that first impression count, take care to put them at the center of your culture. This is why investing in a strong call center incentive program that focuses on people will make for a great people-first culture. This will pay off in terms of high growth, low turnover, and satisfied customers.

How to Prevent Call Center Burnout

One of the main things to consider when improving your call center incentive is call center agent burnout. You have to realize that your call center reps are frequently dealing with problems and get in touch with unhappy or annoyed customers. This is something that would slowly erode their enthusiasm and motivation as well as lead to burnout. Call centers have a notoriously high turnover rate between 30% and 45%. 

During a difficult time in your company, a boost in work, or a situation no one expected, the risk of burnout in call centers balloons. Burnout reaches over 70%. The reason behind all these underwhelming stats boils down to unrealistic expectations placed on call center agents and high call volumes. When your call center reps are expected to be happy, positive, patient, helpful, and empathetic, it is difficult to live up to all these expectations is challenging, particularly when a crisis hits. 

During these times the important part is not to let your agents fight this battle alone. It is critical to show them your support and help them overcome these challenges. 

For example, taking breaks and leaving right after the shift ends can significantly reduce the likelihood of burnout in your call center. This will in turn boost your call center incentive. You should show your support team that you value their personal time, and instruct them never to take a call when they should be having their regular lunch or any other break. 

In order to de-stress and help your employees decompress, you should learn to respect the personal time of your employees, which will give them some breathing space. Another thing that you could do is to update your office policies to reflect your determination to keep call center agents happy and healthy.

Working from home, breaking shifts into several time blocks, and offering healthy snacks can be a great way to show them that you care. 

Offer Manager Support

As your call center reps have a lot of challenging calls every day, and every one of them takes its toll on their mental health and motivation, it is important to have someone for their support. While working from home is a good idea, it still has to be properly organized so that your support team gets all the support from managers. 

Ensure that managers are available so that support reps can reach out to them if they need to talk about a particularly difficult situation or need guidance.

Bottom Line

The best way to boost your call center incentive and prevent your employee churn is by identifying personal responsibility, growth and achievements among the top attributes.

Things like: offering opportunities like learning new skills, training for new technologies, gamified experiences and more, will improve employee engagement by mapping back to their values and help them to feel heard and understood. It is no secret that the companies that succeed are the ones that are able to disrupt themselves and change. The common element between them is the focus on their people. The most important things are retention, education and experimentation.

Money does not make the world go round and it does not buy happiness, but it does make life easier. Little gifts for your employees can make a great difference. For example, bringing in lunch or giving rewards to your employees that have a better performance than average.

Another part of boosting your call center incentive is constantly evaluating and adjusting compensation rates to make sure that the company stays competitive in the market. The compensation includes daily, weekly, and monthly incentive programs for all of your call center employees. Call center workers’ essential role in the company is signaled by flexible scheduling. Call centers typically impose rigid working time blocks of eight hours or more. Having the possibility of switching shifts or working part-time would help greatly.