2016 ICMI TREND REPORT: IMPROVING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN THE CONTACT CENTER. Sponsored by:

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1 2016 ICMI TREND REPORT: IMPROVING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN THE CONTACT CENTER Sponsored by:

2 IN THIS REPORT: Defining Authentic Employee Engagement... Page 3 Beyond the Survey: Creating an Employee Engagement Program that Actually Works... Page 4 The Root Causes of Agent Disengagement... Page 8 Improving Engagement through Quality Management... Page 9 A How to Guide for Building Your Next Engagement Survey... Page 10 Tips for Improving Employee Engagement in an Omnichannel World...Page 11 Realizing the Impact of Employee Engagement on Attrition... Page 12 About ICMI & Genesys... Page ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

3 DEFINING AUTHENTIC EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT An Introduction by Justin Robbins Employee engagement sure is a hot topic these days but, if we re honest with ourselves, hasn t it always been? Most leaders have some understanding of the harm that disengaged employees can cause including customer dissatisfaction, high attrition and not to mention, the frustration and anxiety of managing these individuals. Numerous bodies of research (including ICMI) warn of these dangers and have gone to great lengths to prove the value of employee engagement regarding revenue growth, lowered operational costs, and improved corporate cultures. As a result, companies go to great lengths to try and increase their employee engagement rates but despite their best efforts, many fall short of their goals and the challenge of disengaged employees remain. My belief for why this is happening? We re confusing employee satisfaction with employee engagement and while both matter greatly, we need to define our desired outcome before we can get to work on improving the problem. JUSTIN ROBBINS Community Director, ICMI When we talk about driving employee engagement, we need to reach deeper than meeting their basic needs, expectations and desires. In this trend report, we ll explore some of the key opportunities to improve employee satisfaction, but we ll also present ideas, resources and challenges for you to captivate your staff at an emotional level that you may not have even realized was possible. Anyone can fulfill the basic requirements that are necessary to satisfy their employees, but it will take the truly invested leader to cultivate higher levels of engagement within their team. It is my hope that the resources in this trend report enable you to pause, carefully consider, and take action on the state of employee engagement within your organization. It is an investment work that will yield returns for many years to come ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

4 BEYOND THE SURVEY: Creating an Employee Engagement Program that Actually Works According to 2015 ICMI research, 89% of companies ranked employee engagement as an important priority and yet just a quarter of them consider their agents to be extremely engaged. So, what is causing the disconnection? The low levels of engagement certainly aren t from a lack of trying and contact center leaders, specifically, understand the importance of employee engagement. Over 99% of the 2015 research respondents believe that a high level of agent engagement correlates with improved agent performance. 100% believe that agent morale/satisfaction directly affects the customer experience. These leaders want engaged and satisfied employees to ensure that their employees are at peak performance and their customers have great experiences. But, what most of them are doing to address the issue isn t delivering the results that they had desired. Is it a problem with their survey? Their actions? Or something more? Assuming we ve first appropriately defined employee engagement and satisfaction, we must then understand what within our realm of control has the greatest impact on each. In interviewing contact center employees from hundreds of organizations, ICMI uncovered the top two factors which affect engagement and satisfaction: leadership and tools. The employees who have strong leaders and the necessary tools to effectively perform in their position report the highest levels of satisfaction and engagement, assuming all other things are equal. Variables like compensation, environment, and corporate mission matter too but not to the extent of leadership and tools. In an environment that s notorious for promoting people into supervisory and management positions just because they were good agents and is plagued by ineffective systems and process (92% of contact center leaders believe that their agent facing applications could be more effective) it s no wonder than so many contact centers struggle with employee engagement. If we want to create employee engagement programs that work and improve employee satisfaction, then we must focus our efforts on two things: 1. Developing great leaders 2. Leveraging effective technologies Don t miss this! There are and always will be other things demanding our time and attention but if we do not have great leaders and effective technologies all of our other efforts will be wasted. When we get this right we ll see lowered costs, improved customer satisfaction, faster response rates, improved first contact resolution and overall enhancements to both the employee and customer experiences. There are two primary ways to develop great leaders in your contact center today. The first is to focus on those who are already in positions of 2016 ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

5 authority: supervisors, coaches, managers, etc. and implement a professional development plan that includes an emphasis on people management and the unique challenges and dynamics of the contact center. ICMI s research indicates that almost 60% of contact center supervisors were formerly agents and many of them were promoted without any formal leadership training. It s critical for us to intentionally develop leadership and management skills, as just because someone was an excellent agent it does not mean that they ll be an excellent manager. The second way to develop great leaders in your contact center is to study and identify the attributes of a great contact center leader and begin developing agents who embody these attributes. That may not necessarily be your best agent and that is entirely okay. What s important here is to ensure that you re going to promote an individual who provides strengths that balance out the rest of your leadership team, is comfortable delivering effective coaching, and can successfully transition from someone s peer to their advisor. Promoting some of your agents into supervisory or management positions is inevitable, so be sure to focus on who will be the best leader not the best agent. It s also important to remember that leadership development never ends. Developing and refining your leaders is a continuous process that is necessary for their ongoing effectiveness and ability to impact their teams in relevant ways. Great leaders who want to foster and enable employee engagement make their employees feel part of the team and that their role matters. Whenever possible, they share details on goals, challenges, and progress to date. They give employees a positive sense of the importance that they play and emphasize the role of the employee in improving on the organization s goals. They also challenge their team to investigate ways to get better. When it comes to leveraging effective technologies, it s important to consider the rapid evolution that s occurred over the past several years. While the role of the employee in customer engagement has always been important, it has recently become more challenging. With the rapid growth in the introduction and customer use of self-service channels, most of the more basic and easier to resolve activities are now completed via self-service. This has resulted in an increased complexity of the work that is escalate, requiring greater skill of the agent. Other challenges included: Range of channels coming in to the contact center voice, , chat, video even social. Each require different skill sets Tools and resources knowledge management, and often multiple desktops The need to leverage the extended enterprise such as knowledge workers outside the contact center Elevated customer expectations and willingness to switch companies if do not receive level of service they expect In a recent study with a Genesys customer, it was discovered the performance capabilities across the workforce were not measured successfully. The relationship between Interaction Routing, Workforce Management and Employee Engagement had not been established ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

6 This disconnect in fundamental process costs money. It impacts the customer and their service expectations, however it also places the employee under stress. That stress drives lower engagement and subsequently lower performance. In fact, ICMI research found that system and tool inefficiencies and difficulties are the #1 contributor to an agent s workday stress. (71% of agents cited it as their top stressor!) For a lot of organizations this problem is created when they begin to aggregate employees across queues of work. Grouping interactions together into single pools creates a resource model heavily reliant on aggregation. This aggregation subsequently creates a false sense of reality when the performance of the customer s satisfaction is reviewed, this hides a myriad of underlying problems. This variance is detrimental to the customer and the resource model through typically over estimating resource requirements. understood a review of agent performance is critical. There are a myriad of benefits from focusing agent skill set on what activities they are most competent, confident and capable of doing. In all customer interaction types, there are groups of staff who are consistently delivering superior service and others who require more assistance. Identification of not just who these individuals are, but understanding those delivering service excellence is the key to success. Without this identification training programs designed to maximize both agent competency and resource pooling will fail to deliver on the key purpose of the first contact program. The alignment of resource requirements to resource demand at a customer intention level is the key to unlocking the first phase of improvement. Without this alignment, any work to improve servicing of the customer s needs or improving the employee level of engagement will only go so far. Questions like how many staff can and should we retrain? How many resources are truly required for this work? And more importantly, how can we extract the most possible value from these interactions. Without understanding the demand and the subsequent supply. Organizations are simply making a series of assumptions with a hope of finding a suitable outcome. Once the true resource requirements are 2016 ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

7 A checklist for providing the correct environment for staff to succeed fosters the correct level of engagement. Check to make sure these key elements are in place: Align your interaction routing to customer expectations and employee skill capabilities. Align with customer expectations through skill expressions so that the right employee can be given the right interaction. Embrace organization complexity: Organizations have a really bad habit of bundling all customer service inquiries together. This drives resource aggregation and average performance. Align resources in workforce management practices to harvest the right performance environment. Provide knowledge tools. With multiple systems and organization processes providing employees with knowledge tools is critical to help drive performance. Define, measure, analyze, design and verify performance metrics at an employee level. Understand how your employees are driven. Assess not just knowledge but behaviors, use this information as part of your interaction delivery and customer matching. Design an agent competency framework that allows the organization to understand where improvements can be made. Where ultra-performing individuals can be leveraged for knowledge and behaviors learning and education. Embrace the individuality of employees, they will never be identical. That difference can be used to your operational advantage. If you have the tools available to use it ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

8 2016 ICMI Trend Report: Improving Root Employee Engagement Causes in the Contact Center of Sponsored by Genesys Agent Disengagement Employee engagement is an important priority to 89% of organizations. In order to effectively improve engagement we have to focus on improving overall morale. - An agent s morale is determined by to what extent they re satisfied and engaged - 100% of contact center leaders believe that agent morale directly affects the customer experience - 99%+ of contact center leaders believe that high agent morale correlates with improved performance of contact center agents leave within first 3 years Top Factors of Agent Dissatisfaction: - System and Tool Inefficiencies - Low Compensation - Limited Growth Potential of contact center leaders believe that their agent systems and tools could be more effective Top Factors of Agent Disengagement: - Poor Relationship with Leadership - Lack of Communication - Feeling Disconnected from their Work ONLY 25 % of contact center leaders consider their agents to be highly engaged. If we want to improve agent engagement, we must also ensure that we re able to appropriately satisfy their 2016 needs. ICMI - All It Right all begins Reserved with ensuring ICMI.com that they have the tools and resources necessary to do their job! 8

9 TRAINING TIPS: Improving Engagement through Your Coaching Program According to research by The Hay Group, one of the most significant contributors to employee satisfaction is coaching and feedback. These coaching conversations are also an excellent opportunity to build a deeper emotional and psychological bond with your staff. Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your coaching program: 1. Coaching is an ongoing, developing relationship that you build on trust, respect, and mutual accountability. Don t treat each coaching session as a singular event but rather, an ongoing conversation that recognizes and celebrates incremental improvements. 2. Listen to your agents opinions and concerns during coaching and feedback sessions. Coaching should not be a one-way learning process. It should be an interactive learning experience for both the agent and the coach. 3. Don t wait to deliver feedback especially praise. If we don t provide immediate, effective feedback to agents, they could begin to believe that their effort wasn t necessary or didn t matter. Delivering sincere, realistic and appropriate praise will aid you in building the trust that must exist for employee engagement to happen honestly. 4. Have a realistic sense of achievement. Many times, we withhold praise until someone 100% achieves the objective we ve set. If we only appreciate when someone makes it all the way to the goal, we miss the opportunity to acknowledge and recognize their improvements along the way. 5. Don t overload an individual with development feedback during a single coaching session or they may become confused about what needs to be improved or changed. Or, they may feel overwhelmed and stop trying when there are so many things they are doing wrong. Instead, identify the one to two behavior that was most critical to the failure or success of the contact and focuses your feedback there. 6. Use a consistent coaching process. Create a roadmap that provides a visual and written approach to delivering feedback and coaching. A coaching roadmap ensures that all of your coaches are clear on the desired approach to coaching, the process for identifying behaviors to coach, the guidelines for delivering positive and corrective coaching, and have a framework that keeps them consistent and calibrated in their application of all performance standards. 7. Encourage employees to solve their problems and come up with new solutions or approaches. Enabling employees to help themselves is an effective method for gaining agent buy-in and commitment to your coaching program. It also shows the employee that their opinions, ideas, and experiences matter ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

10 A HOW TO GUIDE FOR STARTING YOUR NEXT EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SURVEY The first step to effectively measuring employee engagement is to understand what it is that you are (and are not) measuring. Employee engagement does not mean happy employees; It does not mean satisfied employees; It does mean emotionally and psychologically committed employees who exert discretionary effort to work on behalf of the organization s goals. Once employee engagement is measured through this lens, there are a few best practices that leading organizations utilize to measure employee engagement and connect it to business performance. Don t expect your typical employee satisfaction survey to, at face value, give you an accurate indication of employee engagement. It s important to write an engagement survey that asks pointed, clear questions that go beyond measuring an employee s satisfaction. Some of the best insights come from one-to-one interviews and looking beyond the numbers to see the hidden story of what s working and what isn t. 1 Don t conduct a survey unless you re convinced your leadership team is committed to listening and acting on feedback. If you ask employees what they think and then do nothing with the results, you will foster cynicism and skepticism with your employees. In fact, you ll be worse off than if you didn t conduct a survey in the first place. 2 After you ve completed your engagement assessment, collaborate as leaders and employees to develop the action plan for acting on the results. The information obtained from your survey will allow you to identify strengths and opportunities for improving engagement in your organization. Once you ve identified the changes to apply, you can set priorities, determine resources and create an implementation schedule. Sources: 1 The Impact of Employee Engagement on Performance, Harvard Business Review, 2013 Engagement Surveys: The Secret Sauce of Successful Businesses ( 2 Employee 2016 ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

11 TIPS FOR IMPROVING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN AN OMNICHANNEL WORLD Clearly communicate business goals Help employees understand what the organization needs to accomplish and how it is measured. (And how they impact metrics such as CSAT, NPS and FCR.) Define performance metrics that align to the customer expectations. Provide regular updates on performance, especially at an employee level. An employee is a singular entity in what could be thousands of contact center employees. Provide understanding that the employees efforts individually contribute overall to the performance of the organization in total. Provide self-help and self-service tools. Employees want to feel empowered. Providing tools that empower them whether that be scheduling self-service, quality self-evaluation or self-review of performance. Survey, survey, survey, and embrace feedback. Your frontline staff will know with detail what the organizational problems are, provide capacity for them to actively contribute in resolving those issues. Align this framework with how your customers expect to be serviced. Enable employees through one omnichannel desktop to provide a unified workflow, manage all customer interactions and give access to the knowledge needed to successfully complete each customer interaction. Technology alone won t deliver a great CX considering we are talking about instances where the customer consciously elected to speak to an agent to due preference or inability to resolve an issue in self-service. You can provide all the tools and processes possible, but if employees are not trained and engaged, it is for naught. Take a big picture view of the role the agent plays in the organization s customer engagement strategy. Start first with the role of the agent how they are being utilized, what do they need to successfully do their job? How can technology assist including ongoing monitoring of interactions in order for continuous improvement such as agent training? Give employees the information, tools and training to do their job to the best of their abilities and to deliver on business objectives Provide visibility into the employee s performance (dashboards) along with coaching including real time training nudges as needed. Assess knowledge and behaviors together to develop an agent competency framework ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

12 REALIZING THE IMPACT OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ON ATTRITION Ensuring your contact center employees are fully engaged in their day-to-day jobs sounds sounds very logical. When your employees enjoy their work, everyone is better off your customers and your employees. But this also holds true for your business as a whole. According to the new 2016 Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmark report, the number of temporary workers in the industry has increased. This could be explained by an uptake in many economies and that the time to market for adding capacity is typically shorter when using agencies to recruit additional staff. But these same benefits may also come at a cost. Organizations spend a vast amount of money onboarding contact center staff. The training process can easily take up to 10 weeks or more before a new hire is fully ready and proficient at his or her job. Given that annual attrition is well over 20%, you will find that for every five agents you train, one will be gone within a year. In the same report, Dimension Data found that while agent absenteeism is down, it is still about 10% and remains double that of any other role. Empowering your employees with the right tools, training, information and support to deliver great customer experience helps reduce absenteeism and improves retention. It also means that you will be able to utilize your contact center workforce capacity better and reduce the spend on onboarding and training new employees. What are some of the best ways to address employee engagement? Let employees influence their schedule. Supporting work-life balance and having some flexibility will greatly increase overall employee happiness. Provide variety of work. Especially in today s omnichannel world, empowering your staff to perform different types of tasks across a variety of channels takes the mundane nature out of the job, keeping your employees more alert and engaged. Reduce employee effort. Ensure your workforce has all the right tools and the information to perform their job, and can focus on helping customers instead of trying to manage systems is good business practice. Tell them how they are doing. Giving your people insight into their agent performance and coaching them on how to improve will create a positive, performance-driven culture. Give them perspective. With clearly defined job roles and career planning, your staff understands that being loyal to your organization has a longer term benefit. To address these areas above, the well-known people, process and technology framework is critically important. There is a clear connection between these three components and the balance is incredibly important ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

13 When you are ready to assess your technology capabilities, look at a number of different areas such as: Providing one omnichannel desktop with access to the right information Measuring employee performance across channels Automating and integrating your planning and quality processes Automating training administration (This excerpt was authored by Stefan Captijn, Solutions Marketing Director at Genesys and can be found online at ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com

14 About ICMI The International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) is the leading global provider of comprehensive resources for customer management professionals -- from frontline agents to executives -- who wish to improve customer experiences and increase efficiencies at every level of the contact center. Since 1985, ICMI has helped more than 50,000 organizations in 167 countries through training, events, consulting, and informational resources. ICMI s experienced and dedicated team of industry insiders, trainers, and consultants are committed to helping you raise the strategic value of your contact center, optimize your operations and improve your customer service. ICMI is a part of UBM plc ( a global eventsled marketing services and communications company. About Genesys Genesys is the market leader in omnichannel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day. Visit us at or call us at ICMI - All Right Reserved ICMI.com