No matter what industry you’re in, one of the most effective - and easiest - ways to help increase employee satisfaction and decrease turnover is to let your employees know how much you appreciate them.
In industries that run on tight financial and time margins, like public safety and contact centers, employee rewards often end up being pushed onto the backburner. While this can seem like it’s no big deal, the truth is that it may leave your employees feeling underappreciated or unimportant. That’s not good for anyone.
In fact, there are plenty of easy, inexpensive, yet meaningful ways that managers can show employees how much they appreciate their work. Here are a few ideas.
Offering more time for breaks or relaxation is one of the most effective ways to thank employees for their work. It’s true that these kinds of rewards can be harder to offer with shift workers, as is the case with, for example, Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) workers and contact center agents. Supervisors may need to spend some time working out how to manage giving one employee the extra time, while still maintaining necessary coverage of that employee’s duties.
However, the upshot to this fact is that employees will know just how valuable these extra minutes or hours are. That makes these rewards a low-cost, high-value option for supervisors.
Ideas include:
It doesn’t take much to show your employees that you care about them. As they say about gifts, sometimes it’s the thought that counts.
None of these items has to cost more than $50 (and some are free!), which means you may be able to implement them on a more regular basis. Doing so will go a long way toward not only making your employees happier, but also establishing a workplace culture of appreciation and gratitude.
Gone are the days of professional development being seen as a tedious requirement. Instead, young employees especially are embracing training as an investment in their future. In fact, according to HR Bartender, they’re telling their employers that training is of major importance to their decision to stay with a company long-term.
Basic training that covers a company’s operations, computer systems, and day-to-day functions is and will always be a requirement for everyone. However, there’s something to be said for making further training something that is offered as recognition of superior job performance. That could be preparation for a supervisory or team leader position, for example, or more in-depth training on dealing with a specific group of customers or callers.
With these easy tactics at your disposal, there’s no reason not to start rewarding your employees today. Want to learn more? Read our other posts on how incentives and rewards can help make your organization perform better.
It’s no secret that customers today are demanding effective self-service options from the contact centers they interact with.
From financial services to retail to technology services, contact centers in industries of all types are realizing that offering self-service options is the only way to keep their customers loyal and happy.
But offering self-service and getting it right are two different things. How can contact centers ensure that they’re employing self-service options in the right situations? Here are some tips on ways to make sure your contact center is getting self-service right.
According to research by the Aberdeen Group, contact centers that employ self-service measures have a 67 percent customer retention rate, compared to 48 percent for those that don’t. Likewise, contact centers with self-service programs have a 6.8 percent annual growth in the average customer profit margin, compared to just 1.8 percent for contact centers without these programs.
However, these numbers are achieved only when self-service strategies are deployed correctly and in the right context. When deployed prematurely, or for the wrong issues, self-service options can instead result in longer contact times or a decrease in the first contact resolution rate. This, of course, will only mean more frustrated customers.
When used well and supported by a strong contact center software system, self-service can be a huge timesaver for both agents and customers.
But there are a few common stumbling blocks that many contact centers deal with when implementing self-service.
Self-service options are best for simple, easy-to-resolve issues - things like updating credit card information or very basic troubleshooting. This option is also great for answering questions about things like a return policy, business hours, or how to change or cancel a subscription plan.
If, however, a contact center gets too caught up in the self-service craze, customers may find themselves being directed to a self-service tool or section of a website for an issue that could be much more quickly resolved by an agent over the phone or via live chat. The result is a cranky customer who now has to spend even more time trying to fix their problem.
Companies do this in a couple of different ways. One is to make it prohibitively difficult to find a phone number to call, perhaps by hiding it deep inside a website or not including it anywhere on promotional materials. Another is to force callers through a self-service menu before giving them the option to speak to an agent.
Instead, contact centers should make it easy for customers to choose how they want to resolve their issues. Do they want to look at the Frequently Asked Questions page? Or would they rather just talk or live chat with someone immediately? Offering this choice will almost certainly have a positive impact on your customer’s perception of your business.
Contact centers that are focusing on their self-service options must take the time to ensure a smooth, seamless user experience. That means not only having thorough, easy-to-read, and well-written articles available, but also making them easy to access via an intuitive self-service portal.
For contact centers, self-service tools can be a great way to increase customer satisfaction and decrease the time agents spend answering the same simple questions. However, for self-service to be successful, it must be integrated into the entire customer service experience.
To find out more about ways to improve your customers’ experience, watch this video on Call Center Solutions for Superior Success.
Dealing with angry or unsatisfied customers is, unfortunately, simply part of the job for contact center agents. Whether a service isn’t working as it should, a product arrived damaged, or the customer was surprised by a fee they didn’t expect, every industry has its own share of customer problems - and often, it’s the contact agents’ job to fix them.
Making sure your agents are equipped to handle these customers is a vital part of being a good manager. Not only does your customer’s satisfaction depend on it - your employee’s job satisfaction does too.
So what can you do to empower your contact center agents to deal with angry customers in a professional, helpful way, while still maintaining their morale? Here are a few tips.
Scripts have long been a standard part of contact center procedure. With a script, it’s true that you’ve got an ironclad way of protecting your company from a variety of things: issues with compliance, confidentiality breaches, lost revenue from unauthorized refunds, and more.
However, depending on your industry, you can also be frustrating both your agents and callers by enforcing a strict adherence to scripts. On the caller side, a script can make her feel like she’s talking to a robot that doesn’t understand her problem. On the agent side, having to spout out the same scripted language can make them feel stymied in their ability to provide real solutions to your customers.
While you may always need scripts for certain thorny issues, consider allowing your agents to consult a knowledge base to find answers to customers’ problems rather than forcing them to always go with a script.
This will require that your agents are well-trained in listening and problem-solving, which will take a bit more time and effort. However, it can pay huge dividends when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Consider how many of your customers have been placed on yet another hold because an agent has had to confer with a supervisor about a relatively minor issue - getting a credit for an item that arrived damaged, for example. If that customer hasn’t experienced something like that with your company, they definitely have with another.
It’s true, of course, that agents need some guidelines when it comes to what sort of solutions they’re able to offer upset customers.
But requiring them to run everything by a supervisor just makes the already upset customer even more frustrated, and forces the agent have to jump through another hoop before arriving at a satisfactory solution. You can see it’s not an ideal situation.
So to avoid this, consider putting certain guidelines into place about what agents are and aren’t able to offer customers all on their own. Your customers will be pleasantly surprised when the agent they speak to is able to offer them a satisfactory solution, with no additional hold time required.
While truly abusive callers are relatively few, every agent will probably experience that one person who rants uncontrollably, swears at them repeatedly, or even threatens violence. It’s important to protect your agents from these people by allowing them to disengage from the call once the abuse reaches an unacceptable level.
One way to do this is to instruct agents to offer one verbal warning to the customer before simply hanging up. No one deserves to be spoken to in such a manner, and your agents have to know that the company they work for won’t tolerate that behavior. Otherwise, you’ll have a serious employee morale issue on your hands.
If you’re interested in implementing some of these tactics and need to improve your training and coaching offerings, look into our Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management software. This workforce optimization solution can help you free up time in your busy schedule for employee coaching, so your agents can fulfill their greatest potential as customer service professionals.
When it comes to stressful jobs, being a 911 dispatcher has got to be near the top of the list. Dealing with anxious, scared, tense callers hour after hour, day after day, takes its toll - in fact, many 911 dispatchers end up experiencing stress-related issues that affect their personal lives, including PTSD.
Combine this fact with the relatively modest pay that dispatchers receive, and it’s easy to see why so many agencies have trouble attracting and retaining high-performing employees. This is a real problem for the entire public safety communications world, which has faced a fairly consistent shortage of employees for years.
While nothing can be done about the nature of the job itself, there are things that agencies can do to improve their employee retention.
What makes this hard for public safety communications is that often, it seems as though the best thing to do is get potential employees on the floor as soon as possible - after all, the phones must be covered no matter what.
This can create a vicious cycle, however, with regard to employee retention. It means that new employees may be hired too quickly, trained haphazardly, and then put in front of a phone before they’re truly ready for what’s going to come at them. This, in turn, leads to burnout and turnover.
There are no national hiring standards for 911 dispatchers, which many in the public safety sphere have said needs to be rectified.
However, this also means that each municipality or state can set their own qualifications, restrictions, and methods for recruiting and hiring new employees.
While it is notoriously difficult to find time for these kinds of long-term projects in public safety communications organizations, any time spent doing so will pay off exponentially over time.
In addition, coaching can help your employees deal with the really difficult calls they receive. It will help them to talk to another experienced professional who’s dealt with those same types of situations. In these cases, you as a coach can not only help them improve their skills, but also find ways to deal with the stress and tension that they’ll have to manage throughout their career as a dispatcher.
While pay raises are not always possible, it is usually possible to offer some kind of professional development. That could mean offering classes in managing stress, legal issues that impact the public safety communications industry, or handling mass casualty or disaster events, for example.
One great way for agencies to attract and retain serious career-seekers is to consider paying for eligible employees’ certification programs with groups like the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch.
While there’s always the risk that employees will take advantage of these programs and then leave your organization, in most cases investing in certification and continuing education is likely to be a win-win. As your employee gains more knowledge that helps her perform her job better, she passes those benefits on to your agency.
Plus, employees that take the time to go through those programs are more likely to see public safety communications as a career, rather than just a job.
And a final thing that public safety agencies can do to keep employees happier and boost retention is invest in current, easy-to-use public safety technology. KOVA offers a range of public safety solutions, including the Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety workforce optimization suite and the multimedia call and screen recorder Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety.
The time right before an accident can feel like it goes in slow motion; however, the events following an accident can feel like they speed by. Especially in the case of major accidents, it is important to make sure everything is properly documented and recorded. According to popular automotive insurer GEICO, it is extremely important to get the following information after an accident:
With smartphones, this is becoming easier to do. Thanks to the SilentPartner App available for both Android and iOS mobile operating systems, local police forces will be able to easily and digitally document all of the above information thanks to its built in recorder, data capture, caller ID, and GPS both at the start and the end of calls.
With the information recorded, it becomes significantly easier to file a report on the incident, and in turn, close the case for the accident. For both law enforcement and drivers involved in an accident waiting to complete an insurance claim, closing a police report is a strenuous process that can often take up to seven days, longer than both parties would like. With the smartphone recording app SilentPartner, these reports can be expedited and law enforcement can get the reports to civilians quicker, which makes for happier constituents.
In fact, SilentPartner is proven to help close law enforcement cases faster. Recently, it was recognized by the National Institute of Justice for:
These findings all point to SilentPartner’s ability to not only collect the information necessary to close out cases quickly, but also to collect that information with more accuracy and a higher degree of transparency.
If you are unsure about how SilentParter can help your agency close not only traffic accident cases, but all law enforcement cases faster and more efficiently, give it a test drive! It can be installed as a test run on only one phone. Once you’re happy with the results and others want to have SilentPartner on their smartphone too, it can be scaled up and installed on as many phones as you would like.
For more information on both KOVA and SilentPartner, visit the KOVA Corp website, or check out the SilentPartner FAQ.
If you’ve worked in a contact center for any span of time, you’ve witnessed firsthand the massive changes that have occurred in the industry over the past several years.
For one thing, customers don’t just communicate by phone call anymore - it’s no longer even their preferred channel. Email, chat, video, and texting have all arisen as vital communication tools for contact centers that want to stay in their customer’s good graces.
In fact, truly forward-thinking companies have taken these options even further. Warby Parker, an online prescription glasses retailer with a “buy a pair, give a pair” social responsibility commitment, creates personalized videos for customers. They also have a whole YouTube channel devoted to answering questions about Warby Parker and their products - and many of the videos are pretty funny.
These developments are, in part, a response to customers wanting to handle more and more of their problems on their own, without even reaching out to a contact center representative. According to the company Gartner, Inc., over the next several years, customers will begin to manage up to 85 percent of their business interactions without any kind of human interaction.
While this sort of prediction can set off alarm bells for contact center managers, who may worry that there will eventually be fewer jobs in the industry, there’s another way to look at it.
If more customers are handling their problems or requests on their own, there’s the possibility that your representatives will have more time to spend on creative ways of interacting with your customers.
Whether that’s via personalized videos like Warby Parker, sending funny and personal emails, or taking more time to respond to tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media postings, that customer-centric approach could mean more success for your business.
Here are a few of the ways that contact centers are continuing to embrace a growing focus on their customers.
These days, contact center representatives need to respond to customers via multiple channels - phone, text, email, chat, and social media. This means that they need to spend more time accessing customer information, forming helpful replies, and monitoring customer communications.
Because of that, workforce optimization is becoming more important. Since it helps managers and supervisors increase their organization’s efficiency, workforce optimization software is coming to the fore even more in 2016.
KOVA offers the Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite to help contact centers meet goals in a more efficient, streamlined manner. Included in the suite is:
Thanks to technology, companies have access to more data than ever before. Speech analytics, text analytics, and call recording software (like the aforementioned Verint Media Recorder) make it easy to gather information on customer habits, preferences, and more.
But of course, you have to be able to do more than gather information if you’re going to make use of it. That’s why Verint Media Recorder Text Analytics and Speech Analytics, as well as Verint Media Recorder, allow you to analyze that information as well.
With Verint Media Recorder for Contact Centers, users can not only record screens and audio - they can also search for and playback calls. Recording can also be performed on an on-demand, scheduled, or criteria-driven basis.
Text Analytics and Speech Analytics allow users to search for and analyze customer comments. This can help uncover opportunities to better solve customer problems, identify trends, and more.
The use of workforce optimization solutions and attention to big data are allowing contact centers to become more attuned to their customers’ needs and desires. As we continue into the new year, this will become even more important, with the companies that place heavier emphasis on their customers being the ones to come out ahead.
If KOVA can help you achieve a more customer-centric workforce, contact us today!
Situational awareness isn’t only being aware of your environment, it’s a concept that is now being applied on a grand scale to some forward-thinking cities. Tied in with physical security information management, it’s a way to keep everyone safe, and cities humming, while connecting a slew of trackable items with one convenient interface. Need an example? Just take a look at our Nextiva Physical Security Management system or the Verint SMC system perfectly suited for organizations.
Smart cities are based on the concept of situation management, of being aware of your environment, and making choices to help a busy city move right along. We’ve selected two cities to highlight how they have implemented these technologies to become stronger. You know we are all about public safety solutions!
The City of Chicago uses WindyGrid, a computer application designed in 2012 to make sense of Chicago’s big data. It highlights 911 and 311 service calls across the city, and includes geospatially-enabled public tweets, building information, and so much more across a map of the city. It has been used in a variety of events, from the Taste of Chicago to the Air and Water Show to the St. Patrick Day Parade.
Songdo in South Korea possesses climate-controlled buildings, will do away with traffic jams by electronically tracking people through waste and electrical systems, and has 40% of its area devoted to green space. It’s a $35-million-dollar development—and one that hopes to lure in business folks with its lower taxes and fewer restrictions. Completely designed as a smart city, it will be interesting to see how this island paradise plays out.
University College in London has an MSc available in Smart Cities. Yet for all the talk of a smart city, there are relatively few that have hopped on board so far. On an organization level, that’s where we come in.
Our situational management software can tie together your loose ends. You don’t have to settle for a little of this and a little of that. We can pull all of your solutions together into one smart, sleek package. You can get more done, for less.
Whether you want to improve your communications (Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety); upgrade to Next Generation 9-1-1 standards (Audiolog for Public Safety), or for emergency alert notification systems with our KEANS Services,please contact us today to see how we can help.
For whatever reason, public safety agencies - at least, on the city and county level - have traditionally lagged behind other industries when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest in technology.
That’s beginning to change, slowly. Some cities are investing in cutting-edge technology like Smart Streetlights and situational awareness platforms, and crowdsourcing public safety information from citizens.
And slowly but surely, mobile apps designed to enhance public safety are emerging, too. Let’s take a look at two mobile apps that are helping both law enforcement and everyday citizens.
KOVA developed our mobile recording app, SilentPartner, in order to help public safety officials gather the information they need more easily when they’re out in the field.
SilentPartner, which works on both iOS and Android systems, turns your smartphone into a secure recording device. With SilentPartner, detectives, police officers, and others can use their phone as a portable recorder to do interviews, for example, or record their own voice notes at the scene of an incident.
Those recordings can then be securely transmitted to headquarters for safekeeping.
SilentPartner can also record all or select phone calls, as well as capture data like GPS location at the time of the call, caller ID, and dialed digits. The app includes optional Speech Analytics, which can analyze your calls to identify trends that emerge between calls that may initially seem to be unrelated.
Finally, SilentPartner can capture texts, photos, and video on scene as well, giving you the capability to capture more information or evidence. In turn, this can help you and your agency close cases faster.
And the app isn’t just for public safety officials. Anyone who frequently works away from the office and needs to capture information - health inspectors, insurance claims adjusters, and others - will find SilentPartner extremely useful.
It’s no secret that our 911 system is in need of some serious updating. Developed in the 1960s, the 911 system that exists in most counties today is still stuck in the era of landlines and analog technology.
This means that the vast majority of 911 centers are unable to receive texts, photos, or videos, and even, in many cases, to accurately locate cell phone calls.
Next Generation 911 (or NG-911) standards call for every 911 center in the U.S. to upgrade to digital technology, but adoption has been slow. This is one area in which KOVA is working - we offer Audiolog for Public Safety, for example, which is an ideal platform for centers upgrading to NG-911 standards.
We’re not the only ones working on this problem, however. According to a Smithsonian article, a Harvard business school student named Michael Martin has teamed up with an MIT nuclear engineer named Nick Horelik to create a mobile app called RapidSOS that is helping link cell phones with 911 services more reliably.
Martin came up with the idea after his father fell off a ladder at his rural Indiana home one winter. His father broke a leg and wrist, and although he had his cell phone, he was unable to reach 911 because of spotty service. The result was that he lay in his driveway for two hours with broken bones until his wife came home and was able to reach 911 from a landline.
To help people avoid these kinds of situations in the future, Martin developed RapidSOS to connect cell users to 911 via a single touch. Users who need emergency assistance can open RapidSOS and touch a button for the kind of assistance they need: Fire, Medical, Police, or Car Crash.
The system then transmits this information along with the phone’s precise location to the nearest 911 center. In addition, the phone connects users by voice to a dispatcher, and allows for the sending of text messages, medical history, and demographic data, as well as video in certain areas. The app even alerts designated emergency contacts when you contact emergency services.
Apps like RapidSOS and SilentPartner are helping to revolutionize the way public safety agencies work. If you’re interested in learning more about SilentPartner, or how KOVA can help you upgrade your public safety agency, contact us today!
As a contact center manager, you know that your center can’t succeed unless it’s truly customer-centric. From an engaged back office, to customer-focused leadership, to front-line agents who have the tools they need to keep your customers happy, the customer-centric contact center utilizes every aspect of its business to put customers front and center.
Another vital element of the customer-centric contact center? The ability to capture and analyze feedback from the people you’re serving.
Simply capturing feedback is a fairly easy proposition - after all, customers offer feedback all the time, whether on a phone call, through an email or text, via social media, or through a specialized area on your company’s website. And all these comments exist somewhere in your company’s database, on call recordings, in your email archives, etc.
But they don’t do you much good there, do they? If you were trying to find out what your customers thought about a specific product, for example, could you easily locate relevant comments on your call recordings and in any written archives? Could you share, in a meaningful way, the data you gathered with your colleagues and front-line agents?
If you’re answering no to either of these questions, you should look into Enterprise Feedback Management software. KOVA offers Verint’s Enterprise Feedback Management platform, which was recognized this past November by DMG Consulting, LLC for achieving the highest customer satisfaction rates among users.
Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is software that companies use to gather data about their operations and practices from employees and customers. It includes features like survey authoring and deployment, the ability to share data in reports and dashboards, and workflows and permissions that make the product scalable to hundreds or thousands of users.
EFM developed out of more basic survey software, which lacked permissions and user roles. This made it difficult to use outside of a single department, as well as to ensure survey quality and protection of brand identity. This is because anyone who could access the software could author and deploy a survey.
EFM software first appeared in 2004, and was made popular by the firm Gartner in 2005. Since then, the software has continued to improve, offering more intuitive reporting functions, better workflows, and more. Perhaps most crucially, current software can capture data that comes across social media channels, as well as phone, email, SMS, and other channels.
Let’s say you’ve asked your agents to up their cross-selling of a particular product. You’re getting middling results so far, and you want to know how you can help your agents increase their success.
There are several ways you could do this using EFM. For example, you could create and deploy a survey targeting customers who’ve been the objects of this particular cross-selling. When the data comes back, you could easily compile it, analyze it, and translate it into actionable intelligence that you could then share with your agents.
Another great possibility that EFM offers is the ability to integrate this software with Verint’s Voice of the Customer solutions like Text Analytics, Speech Analytics, and Customer Feedback survey software.
Using Speech Analytics, for example, you can analyze not only the words customers use but their tone of voice, pauses, and other subtle indicators of how they feel toward your company and the product they’re discussing.
Text Analytics can offer you the same rich insight into your written messages, like chats, email, and SMS.
EFM also allows you to develop KPIs, and benchmark levels of customer satisfaction.
Customers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the implementation of Enterprise Feedback Management software. EFM is designed to give you a 360 degree view of your enterprise, which includes, of course, your employees. EFM can help you manage employee feedback programs as well as customer feedback initiatives.
If managed well, your employee feedback program can positively impact your customer satisfaction as well. Employees who feel respected and listened to will naturally feel a greater sense of ownership in their positions, and work harder toward making their customers happy.
Do you think your organization could benefit from Enterprise Feedback Management software? Contact us at KOVA today to learn more!
When it comes to public safety organizations - especially local ones like police, fire, and EMS - there's often one obstacle to improving services that is especially hard to overcome: lack of money.
This could be said of many government-run departments, but for whatever reason, public safety seems to get hit pretty hard. Many towns and cities face serious shortages of police officers, firefighters, EMS workers, and 911 dispatchers. And the nation as a whole is largely still operating on an outdated 911 communications system.
With these sorts of issues to deal with, it can often seem like getting the funds to implement new software is nothing short of a fantasy. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way.
In the last few months, a couple of American cities have made rather high-profile commitments to increasing their public safety budgets.
In Anchorage, Alaska Mayor Ethan Berkowitz added $5 million to the city's public safety budget in order to increase its number of police officers and firefighters. This will, he says, actually save the city money in the long run - with enough workers to adequately staff the police and fire departments, those departments' reliance on overtime will decrease.
In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced a focus on public safety in that city's 2016 budget. The funds will go to pay raises for police officers and to increasing the size of police recruit classes.
But notably, Mayor Landrieu is also intending to put some of the funds toward public safety technology. Good technology can help police do their jobs better and more efficiently, as well as help to make up gaps when the city's doesn't have enough police officers on the job.
On the other side of things, Dallas' city budget was questioned by public safety officials last September when it was passed. Although it added money to the public safety budget overall, police officials say that their pay is still lower than other cities. In addition, the overall percentage of the budget spent on public safety is down from 67 percent to 63 percent.
So while the struggle is still ongoing, it's reassuring to see that some places are realizing just how vital public safety is to a community - and, in turn, how vital money is to a strong public safety department.
While having enough police officers, firefighters, and EMS workers on the ground is essential to a healthy, safe community, it's important to consider the role that technology can play in supporting these workers.
An antiquated 911 system that can't accurately pinpoint a caller's location results in longer response times, inefficient use of resources, and in the worst cases, worse outcomes for citizens.
Replace it with a system that adheres to Next Generation 911 (NG911) standards, and you've got a much more efficient system that can get first responders where they need to be more quickly and safely. That also means they can get back on the streets at a faster rate.
On the administrative side, clunky, hard-to-use software systems can result in greater lags between an incident occurring and the reporting of that incident; more instances of human error; and lower ability to identify trends and analyze data in cases.
But employing some of the vast selection of public safety technology that's available can make a huge dent in these issues.
A state-of-the-art system like Verint Media Recorder Public Safety Software, for example, can help administrators and public safety workers:
These factors, among many others, can make an investment in public safety technology part of a long-term solution that makes sense for the budget as well as a department's operations.
If your public safety department is looking for a cost-effective way to improve its performance, contact KOVA today!
