The role of the supervisor is perhaps the most difficult in the contact center. Supervisors ensure their teams provide exceptional customer service, and they empower their employees to be effective, engaged stewards of the company. They also need to adapt to business changes rapidly and seamlessly. It’s a big job—and you can’t tackle it with outdated management styles and ineffective tools.

Fortunately, contact center supervisors can make changes today to become better coaches.

1. Replace Optimization With Employee Engagement

By 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the workforce. These modern employees are less inclined to stay at a job if they don’t feel connected to what they’re doing. This lack of engagement leads to higher employee turnover, subpar customer experience and a significant impact on your company’s bottom line.

Historically, contact centers have focused on optimization. Businesses became experts on eking out the last ounce of productivity from employees. With mounting evidence that engagement matters, contact center managers need to shift their focus. The Gartner report The Essential Shift from Workforce Optimization to Workforce Engagement Management states, “traditional operational management techniques will increasingly fail over the next few years. A shift of focus to employee engagement is essential to ensure employee loyalty and elevated customer experiences.”

Employee engagement starts with an effective contact center supervisor—a coach who takes the time to nurture and guide employees. Offering employees sporadic guidance isn’t enough. It’s time to use personalized insights, based on trends drawn from actual interactions; you need to provide one-on-one feedback to help employees grow and keep them engaged. To do this, you need the right tools.

2. Stop Whispering—Start Coaching

While it’s easy to talk about what contact center managers should do to engage employees, determining an actionable plan seems daunting.

Old-school contact center tools enabled supervisors to listen in on employee interactions and “whisper” guidance to them. This method is outdated and unviable; it’s a distraction to employees and it makes them feel monitored—not nurtured.

Modern contact center technology offers quality management tools and provides real-time metrics on queues and employee performance. Adding transcription and speech analytics gives you an unparalleled view into customer and employee interactions, including filters for emotion or sentiment and specific words or phrases. These are the type of insights that contact center supervisors need to spot issues and opportunities to effectively coach and motivate employees.

For example, if you notice a spike in your average handle time on a high-level dashboard, you might click into a seasonal holiday queue to see what’s happening. There, you notice one of your employees has consistently long interaction times. From here, you want to learn more about those interactions.

Perhaps a knowledge gap is causing longer resolution times for technical issues. Or maybe this employee is upselling customers on special holiday promotions, leaving them excited about their purchases and thrilled with their service experience. When you’re able to listen in on current and past interactions, you can form a more complete picture of your employees’ performance, strengths and weaknesses. Then you can tailor your feedback to provide superior training and coaching.

3. Go from Managing to Empowering

This shift from optimization to engagement is gaining ground, but it isn’t mainstream yet. Companies have a rare opportunity to gain a competitive edge by focusing on employee engagement and empowerment now.

The empowerment component will become increasingly important, as emerging technologies change the type of interactions that employees must handle. Soon, simple requests will be addressed more consistently through self-service or non-human methods like chat bots. This means that the interactions that will be routed to human employees will become more complex—requiring employees to be knowledgeable, nimble and confident.

To set up your contact center for future success, engage, coach and empower your employees now. Make sure teams are equipped and motivated to resolve problems faster and create effortless customer experiences. Your employees, customers and bottom line will thank you.

See how the Genesys PureCloud platform gives contact center supervisors the tools needed to improve employee engagement and performance.

 Stay Ahead of the Game

To learn more about the move to workforce engagement management, check out the white paper from 451 Research, Evolving from Workforce Optimization Tactics to Employee Engagement Strategies.