As a call center leader, you probably get limited face time with customers yourself. That means the biggest impact you can have on your team’s customer support success rate is typically through how you train and manage your employees.

Improving employee engagement is an underrated tool for this. It can help you improve customer support performance to get more value out of every conversation your employees have with a customer. It could be just what you need to help your call center take the next step toward its goals.

In this article, we lay out the case for how engaged employees improve customer support performance. You’ll also find our top tips for boosting worker engagement to help you get started.

Let’s get into it.

What is employee engagement, exactly?

Employee engagement is a straightforward concept. It refers to the strength of connection that employees feel toward their workplace and the work tasks they complete.

That sounds nice in theory, but what does it look like in practice? In other words, as a leader in a call center, how do you know if your employees are engaged or not?

Here are some signs you can watch for you as you evaluate how engaged your employees are:

• Positive attitudes
• Frequent collaboration
• Proactivity
• Willingness to learn
• Capable of adapting to changing circumstances
• Responsibility and reliability

If your average employee displays traits like these, you deserve to pat yourself on the back, as research indicates that only about 15% of employees report feeling engaged in the workplace. Given that figure, it’s likely that your call center could stand to work on employee engagement.

What impact will improving employee engagement have on customer support?

So we know what employee engagement is and how it looks, but is it really worth allocating your limited time toward improving it? Our experience says yes. Here are three key reasons why.

Improved productivity

First, engaged employees are nearly 20% more productive than non-engaged workers. That means you end up getting about 20% more value out of every labor hour you pay to employees who feel engaged. This alone could have a sizeable impact on your company’s performance when multiplied across each employee in your call center.

Reduced turnover

Engaged employees feel alignment between their own goals and the goals of the company they work for. This has a tendency to reduce employee turnover, which can be extremely valuable to your business.

Research suggests the average cost of training a new employee is about $1,250. That means you gain a competitive advantage simply by hanging on to more of your current workforce for longer. Prioritizing employee engagement is one of the most effective strategies for achieving this.

Better customer service

Finally, engaged employees aren’t just better for your business, they’re also better for your customers. When customer service workers feel engaged, they’re more likely to go above and beyond to solve your clients’ problems so they remain satisfied with your business.

Even though we’ve framed this as a positive impact that employee engagement can have on your customers, it’s also one that your call center will benefit from. When customers are satisfied, they’re less likely to consider switching to one of your competitors. That’s good news for your bottom line.

How to increase employee engagement in your call center

Hopefully, the previous section clarified why it’s worth prioritizing employee engagement in your call center. Now, let’s look at some actionable steps you can take to start curating a more engaged workforce. Here are five strategies to get you started.

Encourage interaction

Fostering a sense of community in your call center is a good first step toward creating a more engaged workforce. This can involve hosting regular company-wide events or building teams for various purposes so that employees from different sections can get to know one another better.

The idea here is that you want your workers to feel like they’re on a single, unified team, working toward a common goal. That way, employees feel compelled to work hard for one another in addition to working diligently for the company.

When you help your employees build bonds like this, they connect with one another and gradually start to feel like they belong to a team. If you can create this type of atmosphere within your call center, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your employee engagement goals in no time.

Give recognition

Another major step in creating a more engaged workforce is giving out recognition to individual employees when it’s warranted. For example, if a customer service representative closes a big sale, let them know that you noticed what they did and you appreciate their effort.

Note that there are many different ways to give recognition. The easiest, most cost-effective method is to simply verbalize that you’re happy with an employee when you notice them doing something good. This type of positive reinforcement alone can help them feel more satisfied and recognized at work.

You may also want to consider giving recognition through various perks. For example, you could recognize the customer support agent with the highest success rate with a gift card, an extra day of paid vacation, or a dedicated parking spot just outside your call center’s doors.

Invest in your employees

As a call center leader, your job is to prioritize the needs of the business as a whole over the needs of any individual employee. But that’s typically not a customer support agent’s first priority. Their first priority is likely to be taking the next step toward their long-term career goals.

That’s why it’s important to invest in your employees. Take the time to sit down with your customer support agents and talk about what they envision for themselves in the future. Then, do your best to create a training plan for the employee to follow so that they can gradually work toward that goal with your support.

The logic here is that your employees are likelier to be engaged at work if they know that being engaged serves their self-interest. When you show employees that they have a better future at your call center if they work toward it, then they’ll be much likelier to do so. That translates to a more engaged workforce when applied across each of your customer support representatives.

Focus on worker well-being

One of the key concepts behind the idea of employee engagement is wanting your workers to go above and beyond what they have to do to generate more value for your company. That’s typically much easier to do if you show through action that you’re willing to take the same type of above-and-beyond action for your team.

In other words, focus on worker well-being in your call center. Take care of your people beyond what you have to do and watch how they reciprocate. The results could surprise you.

Solicit feedback actively

Finally, another major element of curating a more engaged workforce is soliciting feedback from your team on a regular basis. But it’s not enough to just ask for feedback, you also need to show your workers that you’re implementing their suggestions when possible.

This is a more collaborative approach than the traditional manager-employee relationship. By actively soliciting feedback, you can make your team feel more involved in the decision-making process and, thereby, increase their engagement at work.

The costs of improving employee engagement don’t need to break your budget

One thing we hear a lot from call center managers is concern about the cost of implementing new strategies to boost employee engagement. But the steps we’ve laid out throughout this article don’t have to break your budget.

For example, you can show recognition through simple words of affirmation, solicit and implement employee feedback at no cost, and help your employees work toward their career goals with nothing but your time.

The point of this section is just to reiterate that you can curate a more engaged workforce without spending much of anything. It’s worth trying the free strategies we laid out in this article first. Then, if you still wish your employees were more engaged, you can start looking into paid engagement-boosting strategies to kick your efforts up a notch.

The Cattalyst can help your call center improve its customer support performance

We hope this article successfully conveys that you can improve your call center’s customer support performance by boosting employee engagement. But that’s not the only strategy at your disposal for improving performance and hitting more ambitious objectives.

You might also consider partnering with a team of call center experts who can evaluate your current employees’ performance and leverage their expertise to improve it. That’s exactly what we offer at The Cattalyst.

We have decades of call center experience and offer a variety of consulting and hands-on services to help these businesses improve their performance. Reach out to us for a free consultation if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help.