Employee retention is one of the main challenges today’s business leaders are facing.
The average cost of an employee exit is around 33% of their annual salary, and a team member leaving your business has a number of negative effects beyond financial problems. The greater your staff turnover, the more your productivity, engagement, and morale levels suffer.
Experts predict, after the pandemic the number of employees seeking new job opportunities will skyrocket. Now more than ever, companies need to find a way of engaging and delighting their staff, or they risk being left with a serious talent shortage.
Contact center wallboards might not seem like the ultimate tool for employee engagement at first – but they’re a fantastic way to bring your teams together, access useful information, and keep your team connected. Let’s explore how you can use contact center wallboards to improve employee retention.
1. Give your Teams a Clear Purpose
According to McKinsey, today’s employees are searching for meaning in their jobs. Failure to access a sense of consistent purpose leaves your team feeling disengaged and unmotivated. One of the best ways to reduce your risk of a listless employee without purpose, is to ensure you hire the right people to begin with. Making sure you look for matching values in the candidates you bring onto your team will help to ensure your team members are passionate about the same things.
After you’ve built your team with the right employees, giving everyone access to a unified view of team goals can help prevent them from losing focus. Your wallboard can include specific metrics linking back to your values. For instance, if your business purpose is to create as many happy customers as possible in your industry, then displaying the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) or NPS (Net Promoter Score) over a set period will help employees see the impact they’re making.
You can also use your wallboard to display news stories, updates, and announcements related to your values. Sharing a recently won award is great for giving teams purpose. Wallboard solutions can include digital dashboards for your remote workers, so you can keep them updated, and ensure everyone stays on the same page.
2. Engage Employees with Competition
Contact Center wallboards are an excellent place to display information that motivates, informs, and inspires your team members. However, they’re also extremely useful for employee engagement. Engaged employees who are excited about the work they’re doing each day are more likely to stay with your business.
With your contact center wallboard, you can use the metrics you gather to create leader boards and competitions for your team. There are various ways to use this competition strategy to keep teams satisfied. For instance, you could create groups of remote and in-office workers and ask them to work together on getting the best overall NPS score, for a chance to win something.
Your wallboards could list your top performers in different categories, like first time resolution score, or employees with positive feedback. At the end of a certain period (such as a month), you can distribute rewards to the people in your team who end up on top. Not only does this keep your employees happy by giving them the recognition they crave, but it also improves bonding between team members, and reduces feelings of isolation.
3. Keep Supervisors Informed
A lack of good management experiences makes employees up to 4 times more likely to quit. Unfortunately, supervisors are in a challenging position these days. In the average contact center, leaders have numerous professionals they need to keep track of each day. Figuring out which employees are reaching their goals, and which are struggling would be impossible without the right environment to organize crucial metrics.
A wallboard gives your managers and supervisors an easy way to keep track of employee performance, by allowing them to watch the metrics that count. Business leaders can set benchmarks that each employee needs to achieve to be classed as “performing well”. You can even configure your wallboard solution to send alerts and notifications to managers when an employee’s score starts to drop.
If a supervisor notices a problem with an employee’s performance, or sees a customer’s satisfaction level dropping in real-time, they can use features like barge-in and whisper functions to jump in and stop the conversation from disintegrating. The more informed managers and supervisors are, the more they can support their teams.
An informed supervisor also has the information required to give useful feedback to employees. This means not only praising team members for good work, but giving them valuable, data-backed guidance for how to improve their performance.
4. Improve Business Transparency
Today’s employees, whether they’re working remotely, or in the office, are looking for opportunities with companies they can trust. Since the pandemic, the focus on empathy and transparency in the business world has grown even more significant. Unfortunately, when running a hectic business, it’s easy for business leaders to forget about keeping their employees up to date.
During the pandemic, when teams started working away from the office, many complained that their employers weren’t disclosing information often enough to give them peace of mind. Lack of disclosure means your team members spend more time wondering about what your business might be hiding, and less time improving their performance.
A company wallboard solution, which includes dashboards for your teams wherever they might be, can keep everyone on the same page. Your wallboard can harvest both real-time and historical data from any enterprise data source, custom streams, and even show high-impact graphics to bring more context to information. Business leaders can set up emails and SMS alerts for their teams, and administrators can use drag-and-drop interfaces to create the perfect flow of information.
The more informed your team members feel, the more likely it is they’ll feel like a part of your community. That’s where trust begins to grow.
5. Find Opportunities for Business Growth
All team members in a contact center environment have their own strengths and weaknesses to consider. Focusing on the individual performance metrics of your employees can be an excellent way to determine which of your staff need additional help. Supervisor and management dashboards can be particularly valuable for pinpointing areas where training is essential.
The ability to collect information from across different segments of your business within your wallboard solution will also make it easier to see gaps in your customer service. The more data you collect, the more you’ll see where you’re failing to deliver on the customer journey. For instance, perhaps you notice that customer satisfaction rates always drop when clients try to reach out through your live chat apps. Being able to recognize these issues ensures business leaders can make better, data-driven decisions about where they need to invest.
Combined with AI tools and contact center analytics, your wallboards can give you a behind-the-scenes look at where you’re losing potential repeat customers, and where you might be missing out on chances to convert. You can examine how your customer’s sentiment changes throughout each stage of their journey, and which parts of your business are best at improving brand loyalty.
6. Keep the Team Running Smoothly
The right wallboard and contact center dashboard system for your team will make the huge amounts of information flowing through your business each day more accessible and actionable. You can set up different roles for each person who needs to access your board (like editor, owner, and viewer), decide what information each member of your team needs to see, and even set up specific content based on your customer service campaigns.
A wallboard isn’t just a place where you can show your teams how many calls they’re answering per hour. The right software will give you a dynamic ecosystem where you can motivate your employees, by giving them specific goals to reach for, and placing them in competition against their peers. At the same time, your wallboard software is enlightening your managers and supervisors, showing them where to focus their attention and which employees need the most help.
All the while, thanks to an ever-customizable stream of content, your wallboard is keeping your team informed, engaged, and connected, no matter how far apart employees might be. If you’re looking to keep your team members connected to your business, even in a confusing post-pandemic environment, a wallboard solution could be your most valuable tool.
