Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Survey Finds Too Few Contact Centers Actively Pursue Employee Engagement

September 06, 2013

If you asked company operations executives what the most important tools in the contact center are, they might name a few pricey technologies, or perhaps the entire facility. They might think of the phone system, or the computers. In truth, the most valuable asset a contact center possesses is its trained professional staff. These are the people who sit on the front lines of the organization, and they are the ambassadors for the company. A smart company is a company that engages its employees at the very foundation of its business. What could possibly be more important than that?


It seems many companies don’t get the message, however. According to a new survey conducted by workforce optimization company NICE, only 12 percent of companies actively solicit ideas from frontline call center employees. That leaves 88 percent of companies missing out on the valuable insight and experience these employees could add to the organization. Furthermore, the survey found that the majority of companies do not use collaboration or gamification tools – two proven technologies that help contact center do their jobs better – to improve employee engagement, according to a recent article on the U.K. website CallCentreHelper.com. 


Image via Shutterstock

“Gamification” is the cutting-edge practice of designing training solutions that run more like video games, allowing employees to not only learn but be rewarded for their progress through the system, earning points or badges and competing with or collaborating with coworkers. The study found that less than one-third (31 percent) of companies use some kind of digital reward system for employees in training scenarios.

“Employee engagement is a prerequisite to delivering an exceptional customer experience,” said Yochai Rozenblat, president of the NICE Enterprise Group. “Other research has shown that service workers are the only type of employees that are less engaged today than they were three years ago. In order to remedy this, organizations should introduce bottom-up strategies like collaboration and gamification, both of which are included in our recently launched NICE Performance Management v6.2 solution. We believe our solution can help companies gain a competitive edge in the market.”

The results of the survey were drawn from interviews with more than 130 companies.




Edited by Alisen Downey



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