One of many ways that businesses generate organic traffic is through a combination of digital marketing strategies. They attract potential customers by regularly coming up with fresh content for their websites or blogs, which are linked to their social media pages. While access to social networking sites are generally free, you may have to shell out a bit if you plan on extensively using it as an online marketing platform.
What should you take note of when using paid promotional posts on social media? Here are ways.
One of many ways that businesses generate organic traffic is through a combination of digital marketing strategies. They attract potential customers by regularly coming up with fresh content for their websites or blogs, which are linked to their social media pages. While access to social networking sites are generally free, you may have to shell out a bit if you plan on extensively using it as an online marketing platform.
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Learn how to provide quality live chat support to customers by taking note of these best practices.
It has become customary for every multichannel contact center to provide their consumers with different ways to get in touch with their customer service representatives. Aside from the traditional customer support hotlines, companies have also set up non-voice channels such as email, social media, and live chat. Spending Thanksgiving in the contact center? Here are a few ways to enjoy the holiday even when you're stuck at work!
Thanksgiving is one of many celebrations that people look forward to. On this occasion, they get to see and spend time with their loved ones – a time to bond over food and drinks. For some, it's also a time away from work, especially for those who decide to suspend operations on that day. But for those who do have to report to work, such as those in the contact center, it should not be something to fuss about, as there are other ways to celebrate this time of the year. Call center companies should think of ways to improve the performance of their team leaders. This trickles down to more effective agents in the production floor.
When companies seek to improve their customer support initiatives, they often look at their customer service team. Every member of the team would then be under scrutiny—from how they conduct themselves over the phone and their conversational skills, to the quality of support they provide and their ability to handle difficult situations. But if you think that it's only your call center agents who need to improve in their tasks, think again. When call center companies have new agents aboard, it’s important to make them feel part of the team right away. This breaks any qualms that agents may have towards their new work environment. Aside from making an effort to give them an overview about the business, it’s also a must to help them adapt to the existing company culture to make them feel at ease. This guarantees a higher chance of employees’ loyalty and retention.
To welcome new call center employees, here are five tips to follow: 1. Introduce the team Properly introducing newly hired agents to their colleagues can help them work and move around the production floor with ease and confidence. As newbies, they must be familiar with the people they can approach if anything arises during their shifts. One way to get all your team members together is to schedule a short meeting to welcome new agents. Give ample time for some small talks to establish rapport. This can pave way for stronger team relationships that can benefit them individually. 2. Share the operational process Aside from the technical aspect of the job, it’s important to teach your new agents their specific roles in the business process. This allows them to understand how their input can affect and contribute to the overall success of the company. Also, knowing that their responsibilities have a direct effect on the success or failure of the entire process can definitely boost their morale. 3. Implement a buddy system Assigning specific people to spend time with new agents can make them feel more comfortable in their new environment. Encourage old timers to show how the work is done and accompany them during breaks. Other employees can also join them to make new comers feel the hospitality of their colleagues. 4. Give techniques Even if your new agents are technically skilled, they still need some guidelines to help them understand how to get things done. One way to make them feel involved in the business and a part of your team is to share strategies and techniques that they can use. This helps them know how they can start performing well based on techniques that are proven to be effective. 5. Train them individually Agents proficiency can vary depending on different factors such as their educational levels and management strategies. This is why it’s important to conduct one-on-one training sessions with your agents to ensure that they’re coping well and are at par with the business standards of the company and the client. Welcome new employees with open arms to help them adjust to their new working environment. Encourage your old team members to do the same. This can greatly help you and the entire team to build better relationships that can lead to achieving individual and team goals. Do you have more tips to share? Use motivational techniques to avoid burnout in your team.
Working in contact centers demands customer service representatives to be fit--physically, emotionally, and mentally. This is due to the level of stress caused by high call volumes, irregular schedules, and frequent customer complaints they need to manage on a daily basis. As leaders, one of your responsibilities is to keep your team members motivated. If left unchecked, lack of motivation can directly affect their entire well-being and job performance. This is why it’s important to bring back their interest in their respective roles to maintain, if not improve, their performances and avoid high attrition rates. Here are five motivational techniques to keep your agents on track while keeping their customer service skills in check: 1. Help agents prioritize their tasks There are times when employees find their tasks for the day too heavy. Their checklist might make them feel overwhelmed or confused about which duties need to be prioritized. To help them sort out their dilemmas, encourage them to be open about expectations and deadlines given to them. Also, ensure that all facilities and tools are available to support their tasks. Knowing the reasons that could possibly take away motivation is the first step towards keeping them from burning out and giving them the drive to accomplish their assignments. 2. Encourage life and work balance The proverb “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” must be ingrained in every employee. While hard work and dedication truly pays off at work, it’s still important to give every agent some space for their personal lives. So if there are instances when your agents are requesting for leaves, be more considerate and think about their welfare. The more you make them feel that they have your support in and out of the office, the more they’ll be driven to meet your expectations. 3. Provide rewards and recognition All employees want validation about their work. They want to know whether their efforts are getting them closer towards individual and team goals. Without any acknowledgment from leaders, their interest to exhaust all their means at work can easily wane. This is why more than a raise or bonus, it’s vital to give an occasional spotlight on exceptional performances to motivate the entire team to strive harder to get the share of recognition. 4. Set a good example One way to encourage agents to keep up with the team’s pace is to be a role model. When they see you motivated and passionate about doing your job, they’d likely be influenced by your positive display. By serving as an example, agents can take your expectations as motivators and not demands that can be deemed difficult. 5. Provide an avenue for suggestion Encouraging frontliners to voice out their opinions about standard procedures and management regulations can improve any type of business. This allows top executives to evaluate current rules that directly affect employees. Moreover, giving your agents the freedom to share their viewpoints can make them feel more valued by the company. Keeping your entire team solid and motivated is important as a leader. It can be quite challenging, but definitely doable with the use of motivational techniques mentioned. What other strategies do you use in your teams which were not mentioned? Let’s discuss them here. Disagreements among the members of your team is normal. Here are five conflict resolution strategies that can help you settle issues in a professional manner.
Disputes are inevitable in every type of business. As managers, one of your responsibilities is to keep your team solid. By not creating and maintaining a harmonious environment, goals and targets can be impossible to achieve. This is why when unfortunate situations arise in your team, you should always be fully equipped with the right conflict resolution strategies to effectively keep your agents intact and carry out efficient call center management practices. Here are five effective team management tips when resolving conflict in the workplace: 1. Focus on the issue As a mediator, leaders must remain neutral under any circumstances even if one’s mistake is more obvious than the other person involved. Thus, fairness and benefit of the doubt must always be practiced. Give each one a chance to explain their respective sides to avoid any biases. It’s only after listening to both sides of the story can you weave and get the entire picture without giving too much focus on the agents, but the issue that needs to be resolved. 2. Be open and honest There are people who keep calm but still hold grudges just to dismiss confrontations with colleagues. However, this isn’t always helpful despite the good intention. If issues are only brought up once it’s already out of hand, bigger problems can arise. To set as an example to your team, always practice being open and honest about your opinions the moment it needs to be aired out. Showing your team the importance of speaking up pushes them to do the same when similar situations happen. 3. Ask questions Probing questions is important in doing investigations during a conflict. This allows you to gain more insights from the answers of those involved in the situation. With fairness and sensitivity, ask open questions that can make the agents explain beyond “yes or no” questions. If done well, it can yield significant results. 4. Encourage both sides to listen In trying to make both parties meet halfway, it’s vital to give a fair share of opportunity to voice out concerns and listen to different sides of the story. Mediating between your agents doesn’t mean acting as a spokesperson. It means ensuring that everyone involved remains professional about discussing their points and agreeing to a mutual resolution. 5. Discuss the resolution This is perhaps the most important part of resolving conflict in the workplace. Coming up with an effective resolution shouldn’t only come from leaders. It should start with those who are directly involved in the issue. By making them participate in the resolution process, they’ll feel more accountable. As a leader, your role is to stitch their ideas and share the collaborative solution that all can agree on. Having conflict resolution strategies paves way for an effective team management. This is essential in keeping a harmonious environment that can sustain team goals and targets. So, put these tips into practice to ensure a solid team of agents with high morale. Making sure your moderators remain active is crucial in making your site fully functional and appealing to visitors.
True, your forum members are the main reasons why your forums remain appealing and updated with relevant content. But did you know that your forum moderators are just as important as the Internet users they are watching over? Moderators are your forum’s police force. They make sure that everyone follows your forum rules and that’s why they are entitled to ban spammers or filter content. In other words, the support forum moderators give to your online community is a compelling reason why your forum members keep coming back to your site in the first place. Then h0w can you make sure your online community’s moderators are doing their job well? Here are some tips: 1. Talk to them Your forum moderators are technically working for you. Most of the time, they render time and effort in guarding your online fortress out of passion without any fee. To make them feel appreciated, take time to build relationships with them. Get to know each one of them during your free time and befriend them. Communicate with them frequently, even if it just involves you asking them what they’re currently up to or what interesting user issues they recently encountered. Take your rapport building efforts further by adding them on social media networks and interacting with them as if you are close friends. 2. Make them participate in more activities Give your moderators power to make important decisions concerning your forum. Even if it’s just about the mechanics of a forum contest or a new forum feature, allow them to be part of the decision making process to make them feel valued. This will encourage them to devote more time to moderating your site’s content. If you limit your moderators’ functions to just filtering content, they will feel less needed and will have more reasons to become inactive eventually. With a wider scope of responsibilities, your moderators will have more ways of executing their role as leaders of your community. 3. Do away with daily quotas Do not be too strict in setting quotas on posts made by your moderators. Instead of requiring them to make frequent forum posts, be more positive by suggesting goals. Weekly or monthly goals are less suffocating than daily post quotas, so it helps them balance or plan things out. You can make a private forum thread exclusive to all moderators, and you can use it to post weekly or monthly expectations in terms of the number of new topics or posts you want to see. It’s also a good place where moderators can solicit suggestions from one another when starting new forum threads. It’s been said many times, but this holds true when assessing effectiveness: quality over quantity. 4. Reward them Whether your moderators are rendering services voluntarily or with a price, you need to let them know that you appreciate their dedication in fulfilling their responsibilities. You can offer your moderators rewards that don’t necessarily have to be costly. You can even divide them into groups and incentivize the group that can reach your goals faster. Some rewards that you can give your moderators include exclusive site access features, discounts (if your site is an e-commerce store), free items, or forum badges. The options are limitless. The point is, your moderators must know that you value their work. Recognition will keep them motivated to do better in protecting your forums from unwanted content. Making sure your moderators remain active is crucial in making your site fully functional and appealing to visitors. Since the quality of your forum’s content lies in your moderators’ hands, following the measures above can help you secure your site with a pool of dedicated moderators that will help you and your online community. An efficient team can lead your business to a successful path achieved through effective coaching. Find out how you can start coaching your agents now.
While it's difficult to expect customer service representatives not to make mistakes during their calls, agent errors can be minimized with the right coaching techniques by their team leaders. This is why effective coaching is vital in every call center Philippines, ensuring that agents are well-equipped with the right information and customer handling procedures. In our previous post, we talked about the importance of coaching[M1] . Indeed, it's an essential part of every call center that can help translate every caller into loyal customer. Today, we list down a few tips to help you effectively coach your agents: 1. Use post-call surveys Playing back recorded calls and reviewing emails from customers is a great way to start your coaching sessions. This helps you and your agents analyze if there are any recurring problems or difficulties that need to be discussed and resolved. It can help you determine what issues you need to highlight during the entire coaching session. Use these pieces of information to address issues that hurt their performance. Explain to them that your comments are purely objective and you need to discuss them so they won't continue committing the same mistakes. 2. Allow self-assessment Self-evaluation allows agents to listen to recordings of their own previous calls and recheck past emails. This gives them an opportunity to assess themselves and identify what they need to improve on. Giving them the chance to be their own critiques and realize their own errors can make it easier for them to welcome your opinions. Let your agents conduct a comprehensive evaluation of themselves. Afterwards, wrap up by reinforcing the right behavior and focusing on how your agents can progress. By motivating your team to bounce back from their lapses, you give them a reason to strive harder in their work. 3. Listen to your agents Assuring your agents that you keep your communication lines open can improve work relationships. One way of doing this is to actively listening to them and refraining from interrupting them as they speak. This prevents any unnecessary arguments that can spark from trying to overpower one another. Letting your agents speak freely shows that you're willing to listen to what they have to say because you respect them, a practice that will prompt them to pay attention to you when it's your turn to speak. Make sure to repeat the significant point of the coaching session to show your agents that you took note of their concerns. Also, show your support by encouraging them to approach you if any need arises. 4. Provide constructive feedback Basing your comments on facts is a good way to make your agents understand how they are evaluated. Here, the agents can see how their performance has waned, and will also help them understand that you're trying to help them improve and not just criticizing the effort that they put into their work. Since some of agents can be sensitive to criticisms, providing constructive feedback can be tricky so how you talk to them plays an important role. It's always best to start with positive comments and give them your feedback in a calm, non-accusatory tone. These may help to let them know that you're objectively pointing out their mistakes so they can learn from them. Coaching is tough and time-consuming, but it can definitely help the entire business develop a team of efficient agents. So if you aspire to have a long-term success, monitoring your agents' performance and coaching them definitely make for a good start. All It's not rare for team leaders in a Philippine call center to get assigned with have difficult agents in their groups. The reason for having an underperformer doesn't always stem from bad hiring or inadequate training, but sometimes on behind their negative stance can be because of the stress in dealing with customers or personal problems they on the erring agents’ refuse to disclosepart. Whatever it isthe cause may be, their distress can lead to unsatisfactory work performance that hinders excellent customer service.
As their direct head, it it's your responsibility to encourage them to bring back their positive attitude to and be a functioning part of have a a healthyier and peaceful working environment. Here are some tips you can use to handle agents who are causing friction in your team: 1. Do your research Being well-equipped with theKnowing your agent’s work background can help you determine where to start a conversationfinding a solution. Investigate if there are any patterns in the of complaints coming from his previous employers, customers, or colleagues. Backtrack if you have failed to recognize efforts or given minimal tasks that caused the agent’s dissatisfaction. By taking one step backward, it helps you identify the necessary steps before taking any action. 2. Remain neutral As a team leader, you must always foster teamwork among your members. If they are one of them is involved in a conflict with another agent, remember not to take sides or pass judgments based on hearsay. Talk to them individually before huddling the entire team. If a customer is involved, listen to his concern and to your agents' alsoside of the story. Even iIf the mistake is from their end, make them feel that they still have your support in times of difficultyeven if they need to be reprimanded. 3. Discuss in private No one wants to be embarrassed in front of colleagues. In handling sensitive matters, it’s best to discuss it behind closed doors. This gives agents a chance to justify their actions and explain the details regarding incidents they are involved in. Also, it gives you an opportunity to be more honest with your feedback. Remember that give-and-take is important in dealing with your agents. This , as it lets both sides gains respect from each other and paves way for a better communication. 4. Coach regularly In a call center team, the ratio of new and old agents vary. Sometimes, new agents get the advantage of having their team leaders as behind their backs, while the seasoned ones are left alone. This can create a problem, leading the latter to be complacent in their roles. In order to achieve balance in handling both types of agents, provide an on-the-floor observation and coaching for all your agents. This can help you identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses, which you need to focus act on regardless of their tenure. Handling difficult employees can be challenging,, but overcoming this challenge is a must. Keep in mind that by learning how to change their negative viewpoint and refocus their goals, you create efficient and satisfied agents that yields who can contribute to the team’s success. So, follow these tips to start achieving a harmonious and competent workforce. |
AuthorConnie Lansangan is a content writer for Open Access BPO, an outsourcing firm in the Philippines. With many years of experience in the outsourcing industry, she uses her knowledge and skills in writing articles, research papers, and other resources about outsourcing strategies and call center management tips. Archives
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