Engage. Opti­mize. Retain. This is your new mantra. Start­ing today you are an employee engage­ment cham­pion. Read on to fill your prover­bial tool belt with use­ful tips to moti­vate and retain your employees.

The call cen­ter indus­try has tra­di­tion­ally had higher than aver­age turnover rates and in these tough eco­nomic times a greater focus has been put on hir­ing and retain­ing skilled agents. The need for employee reten­tion strate­gies has never been greater.

ENGAGE.

Why engage? Many employ­ees leave jobs they like because of neg­a­tive inter­ac­tions with their direct super­vi­sors or upper man­age­ment. Employ­ees who have fre­quent, pos­i­tive inter­ac­tions with man­age­ment feel “in the loop” and have a greater sense of com­pany pride. Make sure your man­age­r­ial staff has the skills to effec­tively pro­vide feed­back to employ­ees. Rein­forc­ing good behav­ior and cor­rect­ing bad behav­ior must be done on a daily basis to keep agents per­form­ing at opti­mal levels.

OPTIMIZE.

Why opti­mize? Opti­miz­ing employee per­for­mance ensures that you and your com­pany are mak­ing the most out of each indi­vid­ual employee’s strengths. The most effec­tive way to max­i­mize employee per­for­mance is to pro­vide con­struc­tive feed­back. Employ­ees who receive feed­back feel they have more con­trol over their work which increases job sat­is­fac­tion and the qual­ity of their work.

Pos­i­tive feed­back is the eas­i­est way to boost employee con­fi­dence and increase job sat­is­fac­tion. There are many effec­tive ways to praise but I believe the below exer­cise is most effective.

B = Behav­ior. Iden­tify pre­ferred behav­ior so employee can con­tinue doing it.

E = Effect. Explain how the behav­ior con­tributed to the customer’s pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence, com­pany bot­tom line or any­thing else that details why the behav­ior is desired.

T = Thanks. Always thank the employee. This shows appre­ci­a­tion and rein­forces that the employee did a good thing and encour­ages them to con­tinue doing it.

RETAIN.

Why retain? Increas­ing employee reten­tion is a smart and nec­es­sary way to increase prof­its. Happy employ­ees are long term employ­ees. Retain­ing skilled agents reduces your over­head and increases cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. Human Resource pro­fes­sion­als were asked which employee reten­tion strate­gies best worked for them and the three top responses were:

• Tuition reim­burse­ment
• Com­pet­i­tive vaca­tion and hol­i­day benefits
• Com­pet­i­tive salaries

Invest­ing in your employee’s future will guar­an­tee long term com­pany suc­cess. Employ­ees would rather receive addi­tional job skills train­ing than higher salaries. Many exec­u­tives make the mis­take of offer­ing more money to encour­age employ­ees to stay. But you know bet­ter. To suc­cess­fully engage, opti­mize and retain, you and your staff need to pos­i­tively inter­act with employees.

Do you want to reduce employee turnover and improve engage­ment? Find out how by down­load­ing this free white paper or paste this link into your browser: http://info.impactlearning.com/TurnoverWPRegister.html

Rachel Miller has 10 years of e-commerce & e-marketing expe­ri­ence with a pas­sion for social media and all things vel­cro. A ded­i­cated cus­tomer ser­vice advo­cate Rachel believes that every job is a cus­tomer ser­vice job.

Rachel Miller

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