How to Build a Collaborative Work Environment in your Contact Center

1. How to Build a Collaborative Work Environment in your Contact Center In recent times, the ubiquitous call centers have become a vital part of every business as it is the foundation for customer’s loyalty and a necessity for business enhancement. Thus, the main objective of every company is always on revamping their customer service quality. But with increased completion in every field, it is very difficult for a contact center to just rely on the latest tools and technologies available in the market like the best call center software as every organization is doing that. So, what is it that can bring about a difference in the service level of a contact center? The answer to this question is Collaboration. Collaboration enables individuals working in an organization to work collectively to achieve the company’s business goal. Thus, more and more contact centers are looking for different ways to create a collaborative working environment. As it can enable the contact center management to look for solutions from various aspects and come up with the most suitable and effective way to deal with the problem. In this article, we will try to understand the importance of collaboration in a call center and how to build it. Advantages of collaboration in call center:

2. There are numerous benefits of collaboration in a contact center some of them are as follows: 1. Equal work distribution: Since in collaborative work environment all the agents of a contact center work together to complete a task, the work gets distributed evenly between all the agents. This ensures every agent is contributing towards the call center’s productivity which also increases the pace with which the work is done. And that adds to customer satisfaction. 2. Increased efficiency: Collaboration in call centers allows them to complete new projects and resolve customer’s queries efficiently. With multiple people working on the task they are easily able to meet the deadline and provide faster resolution. This helps the call center management in improving their productivity and provides better service experience to their customers. 3. Encourage creativity: To be ahead in the race, creativity is very important. We know all that every contact center follows the best practices designed to increase their productivity but to be able to perform better there is a need for implementing new ideas. And that’s where collaboration can be very helpful. With multiple people collaborating and brainstorming together the call center will have lots of useful ideas and that can help them in increasing their efficiency and productivity. 4. Development of skills: By the means of collaboration the agents of the contact center share useful information with each other. This helps the call center to handle various customer queries more effectively and quickly. But there is another benefit of collaboration and that is agent’s skill development. When the agents interact, share ideas and knowledge among themselves they get a chance to gain insights about other technologies as well, which can be very much beneficial for their professional growth. 5. Improved customer satisfaction: The ultimate goal of any call center is to provide their customers with an excellent service experience and to increase their business reach. So, all the strategies adopted by them revolve around these two objectives. Similar to all the other methods for better performance, building a collaborative environment helps a contact center in achieving this goal. Due to its characteristics like fast resolution, teamwork and knowledge sharing it can be very easy for a call center to showcase an exceptional service experience with the help of collaboration. Now, that we are aware of the benefits that the collaborative work environment can offer to your call center. As a call center manager, you would also like to know how to build a collaborative environment, which is explained below: How to build collaborative work culture:

3. Using the following tips the call center management can create a collaborative work environment: 1. Use of collaborative tools: This is the first step that a call center needs to take when aiming to create a collaborative environment. What will happen if you have a team that wants to collaborate, wants to communicate and share knowledge? How will they do that without the correct collaboration tools? Thus, using a collaborative technology is essential for building a collaborative environment. Integrating your call center software with collaborative technology like collaborative CRM will allow agents to interact with each other, ask for help, refer information and provide faster solution to customers through teamwork. For example: With the help of collaborative tool, the call center management can share the customer’s feedback about a product or service with the development team. So that they can implement the changes or features required for better customer satisfaction. Hence, using a collaborative tool can be a win-win situation for both- the call center and their agents. As it helps agents in building a bond with their colleagues and at the same time improve the overall performance. 2. Trust your team members: To be able to work together and deliver results the call center agents and the management need to trust each other. There is no doubt about the fact that the efficiency and productivity of a call center will increase automatically if every agent gives their 100% and also help the management with new innovative and creative ideas for achieving better results. But, to get your employees to be able to communicate freely and share their ideas, the management of the call center needs to build an environment of trust. Only when the employee trusts and respects each other without making any perception about anyone they can communicate openly and give their honest opinion to resolve a problem. 3. Define role: The idea of collaborative work culture is to create an environment where they can work collectively to reach the company’s goal and serve their customers in a better way. But it is also important to explain the role that every employee plays in the organization for the purpose of better management.

4. Only when an agent has informed the criticality of the task he/she is doing only then they will be able to give their best to the company. This, in turn, helps in improving the productivity of the agents and the contact center. Defining an agent’s role involves the following steps: • Review roles frequently and change role based on performance (if needed). • Explain the purpose of assigning the role. • Understand what others do in the team and how it is related to their role. 4. Organize fun activities: The foundation of collaborative environment is the relationship that agents have with each other. However, it is a bit difficult to collaborate and make comradeship while working. And so they need to build friendship outside the office. To achieve that the call center management plays a crucial role. They should plan for various fun activities such as team dinners, team outing etc after their working hours, where the agents can interact with each other without worrying about the official responsibilities. 5. Appreciate diversity: If you are working within a team there can be differences between the team members for various reasons. But appreciating each other and understanding that every person is different in their own ways is the key to building an effective and collaborative work environment. Using every agent’s uniqueness in a positive way can be very helpful for the management to increase the customer satisfaction and improve the team’s performance. To cultivate this thought in the team members the management should first demonstrate such behavior among themselves. Case studies are one of the best ways to understand the importance of the something. So let’s see how the above tips can come handy for creating collaborative work environment. CASE STUDY:

5. PROBLEM: The case study is about one of the major Hospitality Company called HG group that own chains of hotels and resorts around the world. The company outsourced their customer service department to one of the companies in India named as LTC Pvt. Ltd. “ The task of LTC was to handle the reservation, stay, and sightseeing planning for every customer of HG group in India. But the problem was LTC had very few numbers of experienced agents that were aware of the whole process. Although they were using the latest call center software solutions for their day to day activities but due to lack of interaction between the agents, they were facing performance issues. Since this project from HG group was a huge opportunity for LTC to increase their business, they wanted to deliver good results so the HG group can retain their outsourcing contract with LTC. However, they quickly needed a solution to improve their performance and service quality. SOLUTION: To overcome the performance issue, the management of LTC thought of creating collaborative work culture in their contact center. As they need experienced agents to share their wisdom with their team members and deliver the results. They took the following steps to create a collaborative environment: 1. Apart from using team meeting to interact with each other, the management decided to organize team dinners to allow agents to communicate and build a bond. 2. The company invested in collaborative CRM tools to provide agents to interact among themselves and discuss issues. 3. Since the team members now get along with each other well, the new agents felt free to ask their queries from experienced agents. 4. As it was difficult for experienced agents they used the collaborative CRM tool to share the information or process that the new agents need to follow while interacting with the customers. 5. Now that the management could see that agents get along well they decided to assign role to various agents based on their performance for better management. RESULTS: By adapting to the collaborative work culture the LTC showed better performance and retained the contract from HG Group.

6. They also saw following improvements in the KPI metrics: • CSAT increased by 6% in a quarter. • Since the agents shared useful information with the team members every agent was providing quick solution to various customers problem. • As every agent was able to fix the issues quickly, they were able to handle more campaigns which resulted in improved productivity for the contact center. •As the HG group was very satisfied with the LTC’scall center performance, they recommended LTC to other companies as well thus making a good reputation for LTC in the market. It also helped them in expanding their business reach. CONCLUSION: Thus, from this article, we can see how much affect a collaborative work environment can make in the performance of the contact center in a long run. We can conclude that it is beneficial not only for the contact center but for their employees as well. Not only does it help in gaining better results it can be used for building a good reputation for your contact center. So, if you also want to see your contact center prosper in the field of customer service, use the above tips to foster a collaborative work culture. By Tentacle