Three Best Practices for Engaging Your Most Critical Employees

Over the past 25 years, we have had the opportunity to be in over 600 verified and validated top-performing call centers. This has allowed us to catalog over 300 observed best practices that have enabled those centers to deliver a high-level of customer experience. While we tend to think first of employee-related best practice categories like hiring, training, coaching, work-force-management and many others, it might come as a surprise that about 20% of practices in our Best Practice Scorecard¹ are related to Employee Engagement. 

I want to focus on a few key employee engagement practices we have seen in some very high performing organizations both during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These companies not only saw steady improvement, but in some cases were able to make dramatic improvement during this time of unprecedented challenges. With the quick move to work-at-home, and the very likely continuation of both work-at-home and hybrid environments, these top performers recognize that a specific set of employees, the frontline leaders, have become, and will remain, increasingly critical to the business.

Frontline leaders have always been the key to a successful call center operation. They are often taken for granted, which is surprising given the variety of roles they perform. They are “the company” once a representative leaves the nurturing environment of initial training; and in some top-performing companies the supervisor begins their relationship during the recruiting/hiring process and throughout initial training. They are the single most important relationship that a call center representative has. Their sole focus should be to develop a solid professional relationship with each member of the team in order to be an effective teacher, coach, motivator, and model of an organization’s values and commitment to the customer experience. Without an effective frontline leader, the best an operation can hope for is an average customer experience and average agent attrition, and, at worst, significant challenges to both!

Let’s discuss a few key frontline leader engagement best-practices that we’ve seen over the past few years:

Measure frontline leader engagement. Engagement is different than satisfaction. Engagement is the strength of the mental and emotional connection that the frontline leader feels towards the work that they do, the team that they manage, their manager, and the organization. Engagement manifests itself with an emotional commitment, dedication, and enthusiasm in helping the broader organization achieve its goals. In addition to measuring and assessing employee satisfaction on an annual basis, organizations should be measuring engagement no less frequently, and ideally on a quarterly basis.  

Take action on engagement measurement results. It would be better that you don’t even measure engagement if you aren’t going to communicate what you heard, communicate what actions you are taking in response to the results, and actually follow through with the improvement actions. We have found that organizations don’t get partial credit in the minds of employees. Analyze the results, celebrate strengths, acknowledge weaknesses, and develop and share a written action plan to address weaknesses. That plan should include specific actions that will be taken, the timetable for the improvement actions, and who is accountable for the improvement actions. Frequent status updates should also be provided.

Make proactive improvements. Want a bigger bang for the buck when it comes to frontline leader engagement? Make some proactive improvements. Continually identify sources of stress and anxiety for the frontline leader. You may not be able to reduce all sources of anxiety and stress but set a goal to proactively remove a source of stress/anxiety each quarter. Even small actions can have a big impact. Automate a manual report, remove a report that isn’t important or is underutilized, provide a floating resource for administrative tasks, give each leader a flexible budget for their team, etc. These are just some ideas. Be creative, communicate, and take credit for the changes.  

These are just a few best practices that will yield quick dividends of increased leader engagement, reduced frontline rep attrition, and a better customer experience. If you’re experiencing employee engagement challenges and looking for more best practices to start implementing today, don’t hesitate to contact our team of customer service experts. We’re here to help! 

About the Author: Scott Killingsworth is Director of the Customer Service Advisory Practice at J.D. Power. He manages the Customer Service Certification programs and is responsible for developing and maintaining the standards and operational benchmarks for the program. 

¹The J.D. Power Best Practice Scorecard is a compilation of best practices identified from verified, validated, and Customer Service Certified top-performing customer service operations over the past 20 years. To be J.D. Power certified an operation must achieve top 20% performance in customer satisfaction as rated in a survey by those who have had a recent customer service interaction. Certified clients must also pass an operational evaluation achieving a minimum score of 80% of the required practices. The Best Practice Scorecard for 2023 contains over 300 practices across 21 operational categories.

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