Creating the Next – Generation Call Center Culture
Millennials have raised the bar for customer service expectations. Companies must break free from the call center of yesterday to provide the best customer service experience possible for their customers of today, writes Tiffany Apczynski, Vice President, Public Policy and Social Impact, Zendesk.
Companies focused on attracting and retaining the best talent are hyper-focused on figuring out what makes Millennials tick. This generation is hungry for mentorship, career growth and to believe they are making an impact, no matter what their role in the workplace might be. Less content with hierarchy and more demanding about career development, Millennials have forced the generations who have come before them to rethink almost every aspect of how, when and where work gets done.
According to a new study by Fidelity, Millennials would take an average pay cut of $7,600 if they could improve their career development, find more purposeful work, achieve better work-life balance or enjoy a better company culture. Soon to be 50% of the workforce, companies who wish to court and keep millennial employees must pay attention to the new expectations around values and culture.
If you’re in the business of customer support, the need to accommodate this new generation of workers is even more urgent. The U.S. Department of Labor expects call centers to grow 36% by the year 2026. When it comes to customer service, business is booming. This largely has to do with emboldened and empowered customers using technology that’s at their fingertips to make an increasing number of inquiries on an increasing number of channels. This adds strife to an already hard job. And while many Millennials will begin to fill the seats in the country’s call centers, turnover among this more finicky generation is very high, with average call center turnover at a staggering 33%.
As we streamline our businesses with technology to be more efficient, transparent and automated, the opportunity for human relationships falls to customer support teams. With that, customer service will emerge as the true heart and soul of the company, the avenue by which companies express their values. So staggering turnover rates and a brand new workforce that’s breaking the mold of the workforce before it is why companies need to shake up their support agent culture.
Learn more: How to Attract the Next Generation of Workers
Understand Millennials in the Call Center
The challenge before customer support professionals is to rewrite the rules that have historically ruled customer service. They will need to make important changes internally to curb support agent turnover and burnout, while nurturing a newly minted workforce that demands to be valued. More importantly, with customer service becoming the most important vehicle for a company to keep brand promises and maintain customer trust, the folks behind the headsets need to replenish that empathy well that they quickly can exhaust.
Remember, your customers interact with your customer support agents more than any other part of your company. Keeping your support agents in tip-top shape has never been more important. Here are a few suggestions for creating a call center culture that will resonate with Millennials and surface a new style of customer support concentrated on authenticity, empathy and efficiency.
Build Rituals
Rituals celebrate what is sacred. They create order and community through shared experiences. They bond people together, and, if used correctly, enforce cultural values better than any speech by a leader. There’s a reason why rituals show up in so many aspects of life from religion to government to athletics. When the goal is to unite hundreds, thousands or millions of people around a common purpose, rituals do it more successfully than other practices.
Take Starbucks for example. The company wants their baristas to connect with their customers by telling stories about the coffee they sell. Sound like a familiar customer experience tactic? Well, they use an important ritual to do that. All new hires do a tasting with their manager, who walks them through his or her favorite coffee, why and the story about where it comes from and how it got there. New hires see that ritual and adopt it themselves as part of being in the Starbucks culture. They could try to run an online training course, or force them to memorize someone else’s story, but absorbing this thread of Starbucks’ culture via a ritual has a much more powerful and lasting effect.
Organizing rituals that are consistent with your company or team culture is a key element of creating a place agents want to work.
Promote Authenticity
As a customer support professional, you are most likely paying attention to the latest trends in customer experience, which technologies to begin deploying and where customer experience is headed in the next decade. Any nods to the future, however, cannot be at the cost of providing the basic customer expectations of respect, understanding and empowerment. Customers want to feel that the person at the other end of the line (be that a phone, Twitter handle, text or email) is being real with them.
That’s where it becomes critical to building a culture that is brimming with authenticity. That might not mean providing a hundred different perks. It’s what comes from finding those moments and opportunities to give support teams and the opportunity to connect as human beings; to connect between agents and managers, with trust at the core. This allows agents to bring their full self to the job, and they become more deeply attached and committed to doing a good job.
Providing a culture built on authentic values, mission statements and relationships, will be easily funneled into those increasingly precious and important customer relationships.
Hire Charismatic Connectors, Do Something Meaningful Together, Know the Whole Person
Increasingly, support leaders are starting to think much more about what kind of people to bring into their organization to create a culture that feels genuine and authentic. Often they are waiting for those run ins at a local coffee shop, hotel or restaurant for someone who deals in the world of “in-person” customer service. It’s much tougher and requires even more empathy and patience. These people can form the ‘Charismatic Connectors’ – active listeners that engage in short, high-energy conversations with everyone equally – you want in your team. Their energy and gratitude for the chance to build a career can spread to the rest of the team.
Make Your Customer Service Your Culture
As customer service departments move into the limelight, their special sauce needs to permeate the organization at large. Adopting a customer service mindset and culture of empathy across an entire business often requires a rewiring of goals and enhanced communication of values. Companies must now figure out how to succeed at empathy in order to build and maintain customer trust. While this has clear implications for the role of customer service, companies will need to go above and beyond prioritizing excellent support.
The key to surviving this new customer-centric, human-focused transition is to find the vehicles necessary to keep employees engaged and inspired. Inspired employees work the hardest, and when it comes to your call center or support organization, having inspired employees nurturing your customer base is ROI gold.
Learn more: How to Create a Culture to Maintain the Right Talent for Your Tech Company
