Do you operate a call centre business? If so, the word “feedback” is probably thrown around quite a bit. It’s a necessary part of growing your business. And there are many different types of feedback that your company needs in order to grow. Firstly, you need feedback from your customers. Who better to tell you how your company is performing than those who support it?
Secondly, you need feedback from your employees. Who better to tell you what it’s like to represent your company than those who work for it? Thirdly, you need to provide feedback to your phone agents. Without doing so, you stand the chance of having mistakes repeated over and over again. Naturally, this is bad for business. But what are the best ways to provide employee feedback?
Conduct regular one-on-one sessions.
It’s hard to argue that there is no better way to communicate with another person than to have a face-to-face meeting. With COVID-19 still impacting our traditional work practices, you likely have a lot, if not all of your phone agents working from home. Of course, you can still have face-to-face meetings using video conferencing.
During your feedback sessions, be sure to provide as much feedback as you receive. All conversations should be two-way streets. Encourage your agents to fill you in on how things are going with them and the customers they serve. By doing so, you stand a much better chance of fostering improvements. One-on-one feedback sessions are excellent ways to show your staff the support they need to feel valued.
Be specific during your feedback sessions.
Both “you’re doing a great job” and “I’d like to see some improvements” are simply not good enough. It’s important to be very clear about what your agents are doing that is great…and not so great. Be specific about what you’re looking for and what you expect. Cite such examples as “when you apologized to that customer for the delay in his package being shipped, it went a long way in providing him with a satisfying result.”
In addition, you’ll also want to be clear about the improvements you’d like to see. “Going forward, I’ll be expecting you to slow down your rate of speech. When you speak too quickly, it makes it difficult for customers to understand you. In your last call, the customer asked you to repeat yourself three times.”
Use “the sandwich technique”.
It was exactly one year ago today that we originally blogged about “the sandwich technique”! It’s an important method of providing feedback for call centre managers who are afraid to hurt the feelings of their phone agents. To refresh your memory, the sandwich technique is a feedback practice where you “sandwich” your constructive criticism in between two comments of praise.
This method, “helps to deliver necessary advice in a more appealing and digestible way,” explained our blog from a year ago, “This is incredibly important for sensitive types. After all, we’re all human and we all have feelings. While it’s wise to keep employees happy, no call centre manager can afford to not help his/her employees improve.”
Need some help providing feedback to your call centre team? Please call us at 1-888-MELOTEL and be sure to ask us about our excellent feedback tool, the Monitor Whisper Panel!
