In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.
This article is the eighth of nine articles in the series.
Communicate Effectively
This point relates to communication within the contact centre, as well as communication across the wider business.
Communication within a contact centre is difficult to get right. It shouldn’t be too much or key messages are going to get ‘lost’ in the noise. It also shouldn’t be too little – staff need to know what is going on and how it affects them.
The format of the communication is important too. Often, team leads send out emails with information, product updates, promotions, break times, birthdays and all sorts of other subjects. Staff either ignore them, or read them at a suitable time (which might be too late). People also learn (and receiving information is learning) in different ways – some learn best by reading, some learn best by seeing, some learn best by hearing and some learn best by doing. Tailor your message to your staff – it may even be appropriate to use multiple formats for the same message.
Another complaint of some contact centre staff is that they never know what is going on in the rest of the business – they just come to work, do their job and go home and aren’t fully engaged in the success of the business or (worse still) don’t understand how their job benefits the business as a whole.
This point is related to Article 7 in this series – Work With The Business (available at www.ccaction.com.au). It is essential that contact centre staff see themselves as integral to the entire business. It is just as important that the rest of the business views them in the same way – after all it is highly likely that the contact centre is the biggest and most important interface between the business and the customer – therefore the success of the whole business is heavily dependent on the performance of the contact centre.
For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.
All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au
Next article – All Hands On Deck.