Many of the leading industry experts have agreed to the fact that, the happier our employees are, the more productive they tend to become. Any employee friendly business entity would not want their executives operating in their customer service centre to have a feeling of monotony and boredom in their operations. On a lighter note, there are a few things that we can do if we want to influence the spirit of our call centre team and turn it into a positive and a highly energetic work environment.

Let us now enlist 5 simple ideas that can help us in accomplishing our goal.

• Creation of a suggestion box

In a fast-paced environment of a customer service centre, there might be a lot of work-related issues occupying the thoughts of a customer service executive. However, the question arises, do these executives feel free to express their opinions? This is why hanging a suggestion box on floor becomes all the more important as it can be an effective medium for employees to submit their thoughts without the fear of being judged. Successful business units tend to make the box anonymous as it enables their employees to give a frank opinion about their work life. It is a recommended practice for managers to hold regular meetings to discuss the suggestions that might take the operations in a forward direction.

• Rotation of roles

In a highly competitive call centre environment, there is nothing quite like a fresh perspective that will make a call centre executive feel energised and make him/her come out of their comfort zone. In a customer service centre, employees not to be trained to take on multiple roles. As long as they feel like they are able to enhance upon their learning, job satisfaction is bound to improve and boredom due to monotonous activity will go out of the window. Adopting this strategy will give a boost to our employee retention activities, meaning that we have to spend relatively fewer resources on juggling a revolving door for employees.

• Smile!

It might be tough for call centre executives to maintain an optimistic outlook, particularly when they are the ones responsible for handling a huge chunk of dissatisfied and irate customers. It is because of this very reason that business entities need to make sure that they give their call centre executives a reason to smile. Managers can accomplish this task by printing out goofy, over-sized pictures. Each executive can keep a couple of pictures and paste them on their workstations so that they can look at them at any point of time and have a reason to chuckle. Mangers in call centre units can also try their hand at sending funny and motivational messages that can keep the energy levels high.

• Effective utilisation of automated call-backs

When a customer calls an excellent customer service centre and hears a busy tone, it can often drive hold times into the stratosphere. When the call finally connects to a designated call centre executive, they tend to express their frustration and the executive has to deal with that negative tone. When call centre units decide to use automated call-back mechanism, hold times are taken out of the window, meaning the conversation can begin on a positive note. It is important to note that automated call-back system is a great method to help a call centre achieve its service goals.

• Play team sports

Management of a call centre can ponder upon team-building by creating a few sports teams that their employees can join. Managers need to choose sports that may not require high levels of athleticism. This practice will enable the team members to get to know each other better beyond the work space and help them in working as a cohesive unit. It will also help in boosting team spirits and make the inbound and outbound call centre operations as effective as possible.

We can conclude from the above discussion that good managers focus on influencing team spirits in order to reap maximum benefits.