Motivate Your Employees Like Fans Motivate Their Sports Teams

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creative idea, Employee Motivation, How to Motivate CSRs, How to Motivate Employees, Motivating Contact Center Agents

Managers can learn much about praise from the sports industry. Critical to the success of any sports or corporate team is praise. Here’s how coaches and fans motivate athletes and (and what you can learn from them!):

Cheer your team. Perhaps professional athletes would play simply for the money, but can you imagine a basketball game with no fans and no roaring cheers? It wouldn’t be the same without the fans. The cheering of fans energizes athletes. Fans cheer to motivate, encourage and show support for their teams.  Athletes, like your employees, are motivated by both money and praise. Never assume money alone is going to motivate and keep employees.

Praise progress, not just results. Football fans don’t wait until a touchdown to cheer. They cheer when their team moves the ball to first down and when the opposing team is stopped on third down. Many managers withhold praise until the goal is accomplished and some only give praise during an annual performance review.

Point out the positive, even when your team misses the mark. In an interview after a loss, coaches always state what their team did well, highlighting the effort and talent of their players. Coaches summarize things the team could have done better and quickly point out the strengths of the other team and they do this without slamming their team.

Here’s a creative idea you might want to try. One day I got my entire team involved in praise. I sent an email to the group and asked each employee to take a few moments to leave a note for a fellow employee stating why they appreciated them. The next morning I had 12 notes from employees thanking me!  The notes kept coming throughout the day and every employee took the time to thank every one of their co-workers. The department buzzed with energy the entire day.

Everyday you should look for opportunities to praise your team. Take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers.

Related:

The Psychology of Employee Motivation

How to Establish Rapport with Callers in 6 Seconds Flat (These tips just might help save your job)

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Call Center Agent Training, CSR Training, customer service tips, Customer Service Training, How to Establish Rapport with Callers, Myra Golden, Myra Golden Media, Myra Golden Training, Telephone Techniques, telephone tips

Pretty regularly I get emails from customer service representatives who have just received a negative performance review, just come out of a tough coaching session with their supervisor, or they are on probation for poor service performance. It breaks my heart. I, or someone on my team, will always take the time to provide one on one coaching for these proactive reps who call or email for help. Sometimes we’ll give them complimentary admission to my 6-course eLearning suite. I give a lot of them a free recording of my famous Becoming a Customer Service Rockstar webinar. Other times, I’ll take them under my wing for intensive coaching.

I just got off the phone with a wonderful lady who is in fear of losing her job over quality monitoring scores. I coached her on how to establish rapport with her callers so that she starts calls off right. Today, I thought it might be helpful to share with you the 4 tips I shared with this beautiful-spirited lady today. I hope these tips help you and her deliver a better customer experience over the telephone.

1. Greet the customer enthusiastically (w/a smile in your voice).Intentionally put energy in your voice and work to sound as friendly as you can. To get in the best frame of mind for opening calls, think of how you’d act and speak if you were opening your front door to greet guests to a party in your home. You’d be happy, friendly, energetic, genuine and warm. This energy would be present from the first ring of the doorbell to the last. Be a great “host” on your phone calls and you’ll nail every call.

2. Listen without interrupting. Try not to interrupt callers within the first 6 seconds. Even if you know right away that you’ll need to transfer the call, let the caller finish his or her thought. Interruptions come across as rude or cold, even if the interruption is a necessary transfer. After letting the customer complete their thought, politely explain the next steps.

3. Try to make an emotional connection.One of the best ways to establish rapport with customers is to make emotional connections. If you hear a dog barking in the background, you might comment on the dog. You could ask a customer about plans for the holiday or talk about the weather or sports. Emotional connections are powerful and they always improve the customer experience.

4. Use gentle/soft “ahs” and “ums” to let the caller know you are listening. Convey to your caller that you are fully present and interested by interjecting warm verbal cues. So often, customer service reps listen to customers silently and that can make the customer feel that the rep isn’t listening. Go above and beyond with warm ahs and ums.

If you’re looking for ways to quickly improve your customer experience over the telephone, adopt and apply these 4 techniques. When you do, your customers and supervisors will definitely notice a positive difference.

Customer Service eLearning by Myra Golden

Our flagship program is comprised of 6 online customer service training modules with video, interactivity, downloadable handouts, and quizzes. Customers have the option of enjoying our interactive online training on our Learning Management System (LMS) or through SCORM modules for their own LMS. Learn more

Who Says There’s No Free Lunch?

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Free lunch as employee benefit, Motivating Employees, Video Gaming Technologies

Two years ago I walked into my client’s office for the first time for an exploratory meeting. The aroma of deli sandwiches and fresh salads was in the air. I spotted a buffet table surrounded by a few dozen employees. When I sat down in the Human Resource Director’s office I asked what special event accounted for the luncheon. She explained that there was no special event, “We provide lunch for our employees every day.”

“Lunch is provided every day?” I asked. “Yes. Every day we provide free lunch to every employee.” I was blown away. I actually have conducted full-day seminars for companies that didn’t so much as provide pastries for breakfast, let along lunch. And this company is giving every employee free lunch every day!

That’s Like Putting an Extra $1,200 in Your Pocket Every Year.

I wondered if the employees fully realized the perk they were getting. When I eat out for lunch, I spend an average of $5. That’s $25 a week. $100 a month. $1,200 a year. When I eat out I drive, which means I’m also spending money on gas. This company is giving employees a minimum of $1,200 in food a year…a $1,200 net savings to each employee.

What company is providing this amazing benefit, you ask? Video Gaming Technologies. Check ‘em out here. Take a look at my full cool client list here.

Motivating Agents and Increasing Call Center Productivity

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Motivating Contact Center Agents

Using Incentives in the Contact Center: 5 Tips for Success

Employee incentives run the gamut from ball point pens to retirement funds. They include bonuses, benefits, perks, and anything else aimed at motivating agents to take a job at your contact center and to stay there. The idea behind these incentives is to keep agents on a track of continuous improvement and to reward them for succeeding.

So often we think that the only perks people want are more pay and then some bonus money on top of that. But that’s not necessarily true. Many contact center employees are motivated to attain additional skills and knowledge so they can look forward to the prospect of promotion or job enhancement.

We’ve seen many studies that aim to discover which incentives are most important to agents—and all have different results! Here, without ranking, are the most frequently cited incentives:

1. Opportunities for promotion
2. Additional training and education
3. Recognition for hard work
4. Better pay
5. Better work environment and working conditions
6. Job security
7. Bonus/commission
8. Employer contribution to retirement plan

Following are five tips to keep in mind when you’re creating a new incentive program or overhauling an existing one.

#1 Make sure the goals are achievable. Many incentive programs revolve around some goal associated with productivity or quality. In order for a program to be a success, it’s essential for the goal to be within reach of the agents. Set the bar high but not impossibly high. Remember, you want people to win. If the goals are set too high, people will lose heart and stop trying. What’s worse, they’ll feel like failures when in fact they may have made great progress from where they started.

#2 Let agents choose their own incentives. The simplest way to make sure your agents will like the perks and rewards given to them is to ask them beforehand what they want. You can include a question on an employee satisfaction survey or find some other way to get agents to identify what rewards would be most meaningful to them. Chances are you’ll get a variety of responses. Keep track of who wants what, and, when it’s time, reward them accordingly.

#3 Make it enjoyable. To really get agents rallied around a goal, you have to do more than just give them a goal and then say, “OK, go out and reach it.” It’s equally important for the process of reaching the goal to be fulfilling for agents. This doesn’t necessarily mean that at every moment the environment has to be jovial, but agents should at least feel that they’re enjoying the challenge.

One way to accomplish this is to celebrate small successes along the way. Another is to continually remind agents of the progress they’re making, the learning they’re accomplishing, the professional or personal growth they’re achieving, and so on.

#4 Use incentives at crucial times. Incentives can be used any time but there are certain situations in which an incentive program is especially timely in the center. Following are a few examples:

• At the end of training, offer incentives to agents to start using their newly acquired skills.
• When a major change occurs, use an incentive program to encourage agents to embrace the change and to make a smooth transition.
• When morale is low, try an incentive program to inject some renewed energy and enthusiasm into the team.
• At the launch of a new product or project, incentives can help rally the team.

#5 Avoid overkill. Can you do too much? Yes, overkill is possible. Don’t feel that you have to have an incentive program running at every hour of every day. You’ll be exhausted and your agents will be too. People can’t work at their peak at all times.

For more information about improving morale and productivity in your organization, give Impact Learning Systems a call at 800-545-9003 or visit us on the Web at http://www.impactlearning.com.