Opening Up About Contact Center Design
Navarro also advocates for a contact center approach that enables employees to work from home at least some of the time once they’ve reached a level of proficiency.
The approach has worked for companies like JetBlue, which has 100 percent of its agents working from home. This can be beneficial, Garfinkel maintains, because people at home have direct control over factors like the temperature and where they sit. However, home-based employees must be self-motivated enough, which means that the hiring process must take this into account.
Studies show that working from home can reduce employee stress at least a portion of the time and allow workers to be more productive in a less pressured environment where they don’t feel like they are being monitored all the time.
However, these at-home workers ought to be supervised by a separate person from the one who manages the on-site call center; otherwise, things can become too complex and confusing, says Garfinkel, who notes that toggling between a screen and an indoor space can be overwhelming to contact center supervisors.
CONSIDER THE LOOK AND FEEL
Another crucial element in the overall contact center design is maintaining visual elements of the corporate identity, experts agree. At one outsourced call center, the environment had very few branding markers, providing employees with little or no sense of the brand that they were representing other than what was visible on their computer screens, Hambrose recalls. “We were able to increase the energy and focus of the team by building an environment that had reminders of the brand and the sensational stuff that came with it,” he says. As a result, levels of performance were raised to where they were comparable to the in-house call center.
To incentivize people to want to come into the office, companies can consider putting in fun objects like punching dummies, basketball hoops, ping-pong tables, and the like, Navarro notes. Bright colored walls can go a long way, too.
As another way to help boost employee satisfaction, companies can provide accommodations that take the individual’s family needs into account, say by providing child-care facilities, according to Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting.
And lastly, it’s all about location, location, location. When contact centers are housed in the same building as the rest of the company—alongside marketing and sales divisions, for instance—the company risks serious problems with employee engagement and morale when one department has better accommodations than the other. Too often, companies undervalue their service reps and make them feel dispensable (so, naturally, they’re more likely to quit). Housing them in inferior work environments can also prompt other employees to think less of them, take them less seriously, or treat them with less respect. Garfinkel notes that in one call center, this resulted in the marketing department’s failure to give agents information that would help them provide higher levels of service.
It’s no surprise that facility design problems can be especially detrimental to employees who frequently interact with customers. Any source of employee dissatisfaction can have a tangible negative impact on staffing, given that the contact center industry is more prone to high worker turnover than many other fields. Furthermore, logic dictates that disgruntled employees will likely have poorer interactions with customers.
“The bottom line is that if you have happy employees, that tends to translate into good [customer] interactions,” Navarro says.
Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.