5 Things to Consider When Building a Call Center Culture

In today’s competitive professional marketplace, company culture is often the dividing line between keeping rock star employees or losing them to competitors. Some roles are particularly important to foster a positive company culture, and customer service agents in your call center are one of these critical roles. Your call center is the front line of your business and often the only people who will interact with paying customers. A positive, vibrant and collaborative call center is more successful than a group of bored, burnt-out customer service agents.

When building a call center culture, it’s important to take steps to recognize each agent individually, but also create a culture where everyone is working together for a common goal. Follow these tips we’ve gathered on how to achieve this goal and build a positive call center culture:

Add healthy competition

Games are a great way to boost morale and incite fun competition among agents. They can also do double duty for you by training your call center staff. Think of a goal that breeds healthy competition but also moves your business goals forward. Do you want to upsell more customers? Make this the purpose of the game. Do you want to retain more customers who threaten to leave? Make this the goal. Then pick a game for your agents to race against each other during a set timeframe. Or think about how you could leverage age-old games you played as a kid for your call center:

• Hangman: Set up hangman on a central whiteboard with a funny phrase. Each agent who reaches the goal gets a chance to guess a letter. Set a big, fun prize for the person who guesses the phrase.
• Bingo: Create Bingo cards for your agents where each card is associated with a goal. Every time an agent reaches the goal, they mark the Bingo square. The first to get Bingo for the day wins a prize.

To pull together the competition and make it easier for you and more centralized for your call center, consider implementing call center software if you haven’t already. This type of software can share real-time performance against key metrics with the entire organization so that agents know how they are performing both as an individual and as a team.

Increase collaboration

Despite the frequent customer interactions, being a customer service agent can feel like a lonely job. If you can get agents collaborating with each other, they’ll feel more connected to both the team and the company goals. Start building your call center collaboration by integrating your call center software with collaborative chat tools like Slack. When employees are able to chat with each other and keep in contact, it’s easier for them to ask for help, give fast answers, build camaraderie, get coached and avoid being alone, even if they aren’t physically co-located with their colleagues.

You can also create collaboration through training — send agents to a professional networking event, have them listen to a webinar or take online courses together then participate in a discussion afterward. Host monthly meetings where everyone is encouraged to share positive and negative feedback and kudos with their colleagues. Creating team projects or assigning tasks to groups of people can also foster a collaborative culture while helping to knock-off some bigger projects you might want to get done this year.