Employee Wellness in Your Contact Center

Can you shed some light on what wellness means, specifically for contact center employees?

Wellness encompasses many different elements of one's life, such as lifestyle, mental and spiritual well-being, relationships and the environment in which they live and work. It’s more than just healthy snacks in the break room and green smoothies. For contact center employees that spend their day taking care of customers, often their own wellbeing can sometimes get pushed under the rug. I believe that in order to take the best care of others, we must first take the best care of ourselves. And when leadership makes it a priority to foster a culture of self-care and overall wellbeing in the workplace, we often see higher productivity, higher overall engagement, lower turnover, and even lower absenteeism.

What a great question! A company can exhibit wellness to its customers by practicing what it preaches. If it is offering a more human-based approach to wellness to employees, it can also treat customers like humans. A company can make time to review any process in their customer journey that might make a customer feel like they are just a number and not a person with a life, emotions and a need for connection. Empathy comes into play here big time.

I think the biggest risk that communication providers currently face is lack of communication. This seems quite silly, right? But when we look at the level of technical requirements for tools, and the amount of jargon involved, it becomes more important to communicate to customers every step of the way in words that they understand.

In my opinion, there is absolutely a time and a place for self-service based support. With all the innovative AI on the horizon, there is no doubt that these tools will enhance the experience for the customer…but only if they are done right. No one wants to talk to a robot if that robot is making them jump through multiple hoops to find the answer they are looking for or is using the same wording that the customer would understand. Contact centers have a great opportunity to take advantage of the self-service based tools and the experience around that, but also to really power up their actual agents who are still assisting customers. If a customer reaches out through self-service, doesn’t find the answer and has to call in, is this tracked? Is the agent able to see that this customer spent the last hour trying to find an answer and now has to call in? How can that interaction be different when the agent answers the phone?

My advice is simple yet really complex at the same time: remember you’re dealing with human customers. At the end of the day, customer service is just people helping people. Have everyone in the company step in their shoes, do tickets, take calls, really get to understand what it is like to be a customer. Walk through your customer experience often, not just on paper but pick up the phone and call support, navigate the website online with fresh eyes, and map it out to understand every single step your customer must take to accomplish their tasks.