Workforce Management Featured Article
Call Centers Find That 'Quiet Rooms' Improve Employee Engagement
While many companies spend a lot of time worrying about how their employees are working – and rightly so – successful contact centers need to worry about how their employees are resting. Contact center work is stressful, and this may explain in part why the turnover in call centers is so high. High turnover costs companies a lot of money and a significant amount of customer goodwill: experienced agents simply do a better job servicing customers.
For this reason, many companies are seeking to improve employee engagement by adding perks to the workplace, and ensuring that contact center agents aren’t getting overstressed. For some forward-thinking companies, this has meant building rest time into the call center schedule and even providing “quiet rooms” where employees can decompress, according to an article on the UK Web site CallCentreHelper.com.
Steve Bassett, who works in Facilities Management for Wachovia Bank, told CallCentreHelper that his company has a quiet room in each of their 13 call centers for their 6,000 employees.
“Quiet Rooms are considered an important facility needed to create a ‘Great Place to Work’ environment” he told the Web site. “You take care of the call center agents and they’ll take care of your customers. This is proven true for us since we have received the number one customer service award eight years in a row in our industry (banking).”
While most call centers have a break room, a quiet room is a dedicated space that is restful and used only for employees seeking some silence and downtime. CallCentreHelper notes that companies should resist the urge to use the quiet room as a break room, meeting room, a place to make phone calls or access the Internet. Common furnishings companies with quiet rooms report include comfortable chairs, a small table, lights on dimmers, a small clock, soothing colors on the walls and an area rug. Some companies invited employees to bring in items from their own homes to make the atmosphere more comfortable. Fish tanks were also popular, and lending library programs in which employees can bring in books to swap and share.
Results of the quiet room experiments were very encouraging. Companies using them reported fewer escalated calls to supervisors due to stressed out agents, lower employee absences due to stress-related health issues and emotional burn-out and fewer complaints of rude agents. It’s a small price to pay for such vast improvements to the quality of customer support and the boost to employee engagement.
