subject: How To Reward Agents In A Customer Service Call Center [print this page] If you are a service provider and outsource call centers to your clients then you must know the importance of rewarding high performing agents and motivating low performers through lucrative reward offerings. Rewards and feedback are highly effective and important in telemarketing and customer support divisions. However, they usually fall short of ideas and options for rewarding their employees for their good performance.
Here are a few tips that could help you in properly rewarding your agents.
Incentive is Effective, and so is Proper Coaching: When agents perform well, incentives act as a great way of rewarding them and motivating them. However, you should not expect it to coach them and guide them for further improvement of their work. A little appreciations and praise for doing good work also goes a long way in motivating them. Further, you should also make sure that their mistakes and shortcomings are properly corrected and told to them so that they can work upon them and deliver better results next time.
Rewards should not be for Expected Things: Rewarding agents for doing something that is expected from them is not the right strategy as it might actually fix their performance. If they get the rewards on doing what is normally expected from them then they wont work harder to achieve extra results and deliver extra to the company. Unless and until they deliver and perform better than expected, dont give them rewards.
Being Cheap is a Strict NO: Agents delivering offshore technical support services and customer support services have to put in a lot of efforts to deliver enhanced results. Dont be cheap while rewarding them for their efforts and performance as they really deserve a good reward. Being cheap at this point will make them feel cheated and they might not even try to provide extra results from next time.
Too Big Rewards are also not Good: Being too generous in rewarding agents can also be harmful for vendors who outsource customer service call center solutions. This is a big problem for those service providers who give low pay to their agents as such activities send a wrong message to them. They might end up thinking that the company is wasting money by giving expensive rewards while their pay remains low.
Vendors should offer proper facilities and rewards to their agents. Provide them with best technologies such as a CISCO based call center so that they are able to enhance their performance and become eligible for incentives or whatever reward scheme you want to implement.
