If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about contact center practices and strategies, it’s Greg Levin. Voted “Most Likely to Write a Top Selling Ebook on Contact Center Best Practices”, he spent 16 years at ICMI witnessing and learning about the most effective practices with regard to workforce management, quality monitoring, customer satisfaction measurement, customer relationship management, agent hiring and retention, email/chat management, IVR and web self-service, outsourcing, home agents, and a lot more. His popular ebook, Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact, combines comedy with practicality. His light-hearted approach to the topic has revolutionized the way that contact centers handle their business.
His 145 page book is broken down into seven different chapters and addresses best practices in metrics selection and measurement, agent recruiting and assessment, agent training and development, and agent motivation and retention. There’s also advice about workforce management and staffing, quality monitoring and customer satisfaction management, and e-support, self-service, and social media. Sample questionnaires, forms, agreements, and articles finish out the ebook and give you the tools that you need to lead your contact center to success.
Easy to follow and written in a language that you can understand, Levin explains the importance of educating new hires and reminding existing agents about the meaning and importance of adherence, reducing burn-out by encouraging agents to take longer breaks, involving agents in the scheduling process so they get the time off that they deserve, and coming up with new and creative ways to make the job more enjoyable. By making the contact center employee accountable, he explains that, “agents are human beings, at least in most contact centers, and thus need to be treated as such when it comes to measuring and ‘enforcing’ adherence to a schedule.” He also notes that, “merely telling agents that they need to be in their seats at certain times ‘or else’ will do little to foster agent buy?in and commitment, and a lot to foster agent graffiti and arson.”
Levin also talks about “taking hiring by the horns” by always being on the lookout for exceptional individuals who would shine in a contact center environment. He states that, “typically, an agent hunt does not involve the use of any weapons or camouflaged clothing, but if that’s what it takes to build your frontline dream team, then so be it. I’m not here to judge.” The ebook helps identify your ideal agent and states that there are 8 Elements of a Successful Agent Recruiting Program. Equally important is the “very long engagement” period that it takes to win over and retain agents.
A resource worth checking out, Levin’s Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact is a must-have in all contact centers. If you want to change the way that you do business, you’ll learn a few tips and tricks by reading this ebook. I’ve gotten acquainted with it and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
