Blog: Customer Service

Recognize the bad stuff too!   How to make the good words even more meaningful for Reward and Recognition in your Call Centres

A friend emailed me the other day and suggested that we could make our words even more meaningful by effectively dealing with issues and concerns.  He said ‘Even if you deliver recognition perfectly, it will quickly lose its value if you let performance issues/concerns slide. Some managers make the mistake of ignoring issues if overall team performance is on target.”

I mused on that for awhile, over a cup of morning coffee, and thought about a time where I witnessed this happen.  One of my Team Managers had a team that was performing very well with respect to their key performance indicators – meeting their productivity and sales targets, and achieving good customer service scores.  This manager was very good at delivering rah, rah messages in their team meeting, providing pizza parties for team success, pumping up the team with cheers, etc.  It was apparent, however, that some team members were not pulling their weight and were riding on the success of a few strong team members.  The stronger team members were starting to get disillusioned and were not quite as motivated as they had been, and the manager was perplexed. Had he not treated them all to pizza and pop? Framed certificates for team performance for the kudos wall?  Celebrated team stats in huddles?  Yes, he had done all that – but not all the team members were doing their part, and the ones who were carrying the team were getting tired of performance issues being swept under the carpet.  Why should Susan, who achieved only 50% of her sales target, get the same rewards as Peter, who overachieved at 122%?  Why should the 11 people who met their productivity target be treated the same as those 7 people who did not achieve it?  One sure fire way to demotivate your call centre reps is to lump them all together when it comes to recognizing results – both in a positive or negative way.  It’s just as important to have the tough conversations!

 So this weeks rule (#6) – Don’t forget to have the tough conversations or the great conversations won’t mean anything!

Some quick and easy ideas for Reward and Recognition in your Call Centres

And we’re adding to our list of 100….thanks for the suggestions!

Let’s build a list of 100 quick and cheap ways to Reward and Recognize in the Call Centre

Help me add to this list by submitting feedback – or emailing me at kimvey@rogers.com

5.   Take calls for an hour for your rep.  This can have a double benefit – the team sees the manager out on the floor and their peer gets an hour off the phone. This is also a great way to mentor your reps and teach best practices.

6.   Create a wall of fame where you post new reps photos and a short bio.  This is a great way to ‘recognize’ new employees joining the team

7.   Mini first aid kit – with a note “thanks for taking care of our clients today’

8.  An incentive for you readers this week – send in an idea and you could win a prize!

And remember, once we get to 100 – I’ll post the entire list right here and you can start using all the great ideas people have shared

Feedback or comments: Share your ideas for low/no cost rewards and recognition in your call centres