7 Simple Tips To Give Quality Feedback In Your Call Center
As a contact center manager, one of the most important parts of your job is providing feedback. Regular quality feedback helps agents improve their performance, stay on track to meet their goals, and ensure that business outcomes are met.
However, a lot of feedback advice or training programs centers around constructive or negative feedback. It’s easy to forget that providing positive call feedback is just as important and needs its own focus.
Why Do We Need Positive Quality Feedback for Contact Center Agents?
Scott Halford, author of Be a Shortcut: The Secret Fast Track to Business Success, sums up the need for positive feedback best in Entrepreneur: “Positive feedback stimulates the reward centers in the brain, leaving the recipient open to taking a new direction. Meanwhile, negative feedback indicates that an adjustment needs to be made and the threat response turns on and defensiveness sets in.”
To be a successful contact center manager, you need to know how to give quality feedback in your contact center that will strengthen your team and reinforce the right behaviors in the workplace.
You might be unsure of how to go about it without coming across insincere or gratuitous. Here are seven simple call center quality feedback examples to follow that will inspire and motivate your employees.
1. Timing Is Everything
Good feedback that makes an impact and leads agents to be productive needs to be immediate. Don’t wait until the person’s next performance review to acknowledge an achievement or hard work. The human memory is faulty, and for quality feedback to take root, it needs to happen at regular intervals and as soon as the commended action happens.
For example, if you want your contact center agents to take the initiative more and rely on their good judgment instead of running to you with every single problem — praise that behavior.
Of course, you need to consider their perspective — employees can sometimes be so afraid of making mistakes and risking their job they choose not to take the initiative.
It is vital to cultivate a company culture of openness and equality. This does not mean disrupting the standard structure of your contact center — managers, supervisors, etc. — but treating workers at all levels with the same respect.
Your employees must feel they can talk to you if they feel unsure how to solve a particular problem or complete a specific task. Being able to go to a superior for advice and assistance can help to avoid costly mistakes down the line.
Breaking down barriers and creating an environment that encourages clear communication between all members of the workforce makes giving quality feedback in the call center (both good and bad) much simpler. This makes timing less of an issue, as you can just drop by an agent’s cubicle and praise them in an informal way.
For example:
“Jenny, can I give you some feedback? When you take care of an issue, it takes the load off my back. Thanks for taking the initiative and solving the problem on your own. I appreciate it.”
Positive praise will lift their mood, make them feel valued, and motivate them to take the initiative again in the future. Make a regular habit of giving credit where it is due, and you can build a more productive, confident workforce.
2. Be as Specific as Possible
Not all managers instinctively know how to give quality feedback in their contact center. If your go-to positive feedback line is “good job,” it is time to broaden your horizons. Chrissy Scivicque from EatYourCareer.com recommends the following when delivering positive specific feedback:
- Use the person’s name.
- Describe the specific actions you observed or learned.
- Avoid ambiguous details.
For example:
“Sarah, I appreciate you staying at work last night to help with the backlog. I know you were not asked to go out of your way to do that, and you put in a lot of time and effort. It shows your commitment not only to your role but to the continued success of our team as a whole. Thanks for that.”
By ensuring your positive feedback matches the above criteria, your employees will know what they did to warrant praise and recognize that you are giving quality feedback.
Using the employee’s name shows that you recognize them as an individual rather than just another anonymous worker. You are thanking them for going above and beyond their basic duties, which goes a long way to making them feel respected and rewarded.
The clearer and more specific you are about what an employee did right, the better they will be able to repeat and improve upon the positive action.
Related Article: 8 Things You Should Do After Giving Feedback to Your Call Center Staff
3. Keep Your Negative Feedback Separate
While it can be tempting to use a positive and negative statement back to back, this approach often does more harm than good. It creates confusion with the employee and makes your praise come across as insincere. Knowing how to give quality feedback in the call center requires you to think carefully about the effect of negative feedback.
Employees will feel as if you have used positive reinforcement as a means to soften the blow and won’t focus on the behaviors you want them to repeat.
Related Article: How To Create A Feedback Culture In Your Company
If your contact center agent has done an outstanding job dealing with a difficult customer on the phone, praise them for that. You don’t need to give them constructive feedback on what they could have done better. If you do need to discuss areas of improvement, schedule that conversation for another time.
When you do deliver negative feedback, you have to be tactful and consider the employee’s feelings. This can feel far from your mind if you are having a challenging day yourself.
Stresses and strains have a habit of shortening tempers, and if you are feeling in a bad mood, your criticism might become less constructive than it should be.
Try to arrange meetings to discuss mistakes and improvements at a time you know you are less likely to be frustrated or flustered. Get into the right headspace to see the discussion from the employee’s view. It is vital that they feel you are interested in making them a better, more productive employee rather than basking in the opportunity to flex your managerial muscles.
For example:
“Joe, thank you for sitting down with me for this discussion. The goal here is to look at how we can give our callers more and make sure they feel they have received the very best service. Let’s explore a few points to focus on that can help each customer end their call with a smile on their face, okay?”
The above example is friendly, focuses on the positive outcome of constructive criticism, and highlights your reasons for pointing out mistakes they might have made.
4. Don’t Focus on Recognizing Results Only
No matter which industry a manager is in, it’s easy to get trapped in the bad habit of recognizing results and not what the person did to obtain them.
This is understandable. As a manager, your focus is often on the bottom line and keeping the contact center running at its best. You spend a lot of time assessing employees’ results and how they contribute to your overall success.
However, the reality is that your workforce is made up of people. They each have their own thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, and fears. Completing a task might be more difficult for one individual than for another, and praise can help to make them feel their effort was truly worth it.
Related Article: 12 Easy And Creative Call Center Reward And Recognition Ideas
Remembering that is key when thinking about how to give quality feedback in your contact center. When delivering positive employee feedback, make sure you are articulating the effort and behavior and not the results, which are often out of the employee’s control. Recognize the individual performed at an exceptional level and has demonstrated their abilities to a high standard.
For example:
“Alison, I think your presentation impressed the client. We might have a shot at securing this new contract.”
By keeping this in mind, you are still acknowledging the work that Alison put in and that it is worthy of recognition, even if the contact center does not get the new business. In this example, Alison’s presentation still represents your company and team brilliantly.
This will only do positive things for your reputation and might lead the prospective client to recommend you to others in the future. If Alison’s presentation did not win the contract, her manager should thank her again and emphasize that other factors beyond her presentation contributed to the client’s decision.
5. Recognize How the Behavior Made a Positive Impact
If you are struggling with how to give quality feedback in the call center, ask yourself these questions about the employee:
- How has the employee made your life easier?
- How has the employee helped the team or contact center as a whole?
- In what ways has the employee gone above and beyond their job description?
Once you can answer these questions, you will be able to identify the positive ways the employee’s work is affecting you, the team, and the organization. Think about the benefits they bring to the contact center and their colleagues carefully and prepare a few positive feedback examples you can point to while delivering praise.
For example:
“Olivia, I’m glad to know that our team can rely on you in a time of crisis like this. It gives me peace of mind to know you are here and how much you care about the team and the contact center as a whole.”
In this instance, Olivia is made aware that she is reliable, helps to make your job easier, and is a point of stability in your busy environment. You would also be drawing attention to her commitment to her colleagues and showing that you recognize how she has performed beyond what her contract might specify.
Related Article: 9 Contact Center Metrics Essential for Success
6. Back-Up Quality Feedback with Evidence
Using call recording software gives you support when providing feedback, good or bad.
If an agent receives a call from a difficult customer who clearly has an ax to grind, how they handle it can have a serious impact on the caller’s view of the company. Agents are expected to remain neutral, be helpful and represent the company as best they can regardless of how insulting a caller might be.
This is much easier said than done. Many people might struggle to bite their tongue if someone were to launch a verbal assault at them, but being able to do so is the mark of a good agent.
If an employee has received such a challenging call from a disgruntled customer, play the recording back to highlight good or bad areas. Did the agent say something that worsened the situation? Did they manage to calm the caller down and leave them in a positive mood?
For example:
“John, your tone of voice here and your sincere apology on behalf of the company clearly set the customer at ease. You followed procedure and never rose to their attempts to trigger an emotional response. We will use this call in future training sessions.”
7. Realize Quality Feedback Is a Two-Way Street
Your employees have their own thoughts and opinions on working in your contact center. They are the core resource and perform vital work every day.
While you should provide feedback on a regular basis to guide your workforce’s development, you must invite employees’ feedback too. This is a big part of knowing how to give quality feedback in the contact center.
Let employees know it is okay to be specific. Are there any factors that make their work more frustrating or complicated than it could be? Are your systems too convoluted and cumbersome? Do they feel undervalued and disrespected?
You should invite employees to provide feedback in an honest way, whenever they like. They experience the contact center and working processes in a different way to managers, and their insights can make a powerful positive impact.
For example:
“Melissa, thank you for your well-reasoned insights into how our software needs updating and improving. We are currently discussing options and plan to overhaul the system soon. This will help us all to work to a better standard and save time in the future.”
Your employees will feel that their opinion is valued and matters. Critiquing the way in which the contact center works takes courage, and individuals should be rewarded for that.
By following these seven call center quality feedback examples, you will have a more motivated and focused workforce. Your employees will experience greater job satisfaction, and as a result, your team will increase productivity and work together like a well-oiled machine, thus making the time to be more conscientious and regular with your feedback entirely worthwhile.
