There is a big shift of focus in the contact center to enhance employee engagement, which, in turn, drives enhanced customer experiences. Happy employees make for happy customers. That process begins with how employees are brought on board and treated throughout their entire journey. The goal is to hire the right people—at the right time—and provide them with training, tools, and experience that is right for them, for your customers, and for your organization.

Let’s look at four tips to boost employee engagement:

Tip 1: Know When and Who to Hire

Imagine if you could know the ideal time to bring on new employees to address forecasted growth. And imagine that your new hires are ready for the job right in time for the summer surge, holiday rush, or a new product launch.

Advanced capacity planning tools can help you uncover not only when you need to have new employees online to meet business objectives, but also what types of skills they should have. This will allow you to plan when to hire people and see the effect of their training plans on the business, in terms of cost and coverage, as they work through the onboarding process.

Insights into which agents to hire is just as important as knowing when to bring new employees on board. Creating training plans that ensure agents are on board and ready when they are needed is key to driving better employee experiences.

Tip 2: Build the Ideal Employee Performance Blueprint

What if you could create a profile of your ideal candidate and then create assessments that uncover if they have the base skills to make the most impact to your customers? Workforce optimization tools can correlate business performance with employee skills and knowledge to identify which traits drive the best business outcomes. This allows you to create a blueprint of what a “great” employee is, and then you can focus on hiring the right people. Once you know that, you can measure the knowledge each candidate has, which will help you determine if they best fit the type of candidate you want to hire.

Additionally, you can create customized training plans to fill any gaps, which reduces training costs and increases employee satisfaction because employees do not have to focus on subjects that they’re already proficient. This also reduces training time and enables employees to become productive sooner.

Cracking the code to match the right employee profile for each role within your organization will set employees up for successful experiences.

Tip 3: Offer Continuous Learning and Career Paths

Once your new employees are on board, it is important to keep them engaged by developing career paths and allowing them to track how they meet those goals. Investing in continued education can be a challenge because it takes employees away from their work. With a workforce optimization solution integrated in your contact center platform, you can schedule additional training and coaching sessions at optimal times for the business. This ultimately drives improved customer satisfaction, as engaged employees drive enhanced customer experiences. When your agents are idle, you can deliver personalized training nudges in real time.

Keeping skills up to date is the foundation for continued employee engagement. Continuous learning and updating your employee skills database enables your contact center to increase routing and scheduling effectiveness. This, in turn, ensures employees can grow and be successful at their tasks.

Tip 4: Drive Business Outcomes Through Correlation Analysis

Correlation-analysis tools can provide insights that uncover which metrics contributed to desired business outcomes. You then can use those correlations to identify targeted training areas for specific employees so that they can close the gap between being a low or average performer to a high achiever.

Typical correlation analysis will tell you if employees that score high on the sales skill training do sell more, or if agents who have been with you for a longer period drive higher customer satisfaction scores. Some of these analyses can be real eye-openers.

Additionally, these tools can help you determine if a quick e-learning assignment is enough to close the gap, or if classroom-style training is required.

Employee Engagement: The Bottom Line

Ensuring your employees have successful experiences—from the hiring process all the way to that next career move—is a great way to reduce operating costs. Engaged employees will stick around longer, reducing hiring and firing costs. It also helps to optimize the use of your learning and development budgets, enabling you to coach and train more effectively.

Successful employees are happy employees. And happy employees create great customer experiences.

To learn more about Genesys employee engagement solutions, download How An Omnichannel Agent Desktop Helps Your Employees Personalize Customer Service.