It’s a sad fact that the happiness of staff often takes second place to the organisation’s demand for results. We need a committed and resilient workforce – people who have the ability to cope with everything from disgruntled customers to demanding team leaders – so our staff’s ability to handle stress is often a much bigger focus than their emotional wellbeing!
You can’t afford to go soft when competition is at its most fierce, but if your staff are to represent your brand effectively on the frontline, it’s vital to consider their happiness. Our external world is simply a reflection of our internal world, so we’ve got to boost our staff’s inner morale if we are to reap the benefits on the outside and improve customer care!
The main challenge here is that a typical call centre or customer service environment involves quite repetitive work, with similar questions popping up every day, making it difficult to stay upbeat. This can be an even bigger issue for staff who are dealing with calls that are often quite distressing in nature (NHS helplines or debt recovery call centres for example).
It’s therefore important to keep employee motivation high, as well as improving everyone’s skillsets through customer service training and people development. A powerful and cost-effective way of doing this is through ‘buddying’ or co-coaching, where two colleagues support each other throughout the day and help each other if one of them is struggling.
