As a Help Desk Manager, you want to make sure your employees are able to do their jobs to their fullest potential. So, what are their fundamental needs? Here are two important places to look into to help your employees succeed.
1. Make expectations clear. You would be surprised to learn how many employees do not have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. Give them clarity by sharing the following:
- Goals: Employees need to know how their role contributes to the overall goals of the company. True job satisfaction comes from understanding your purpose and knowing that what you do genuinely matters.
- Performance: Define your expectations of performance regarding work duties, attitude, teamwork, work ethic, and professionalism and provide those requirements in writing. Also let employees know how their performance will be evaluated. Specifically, what will be reviewed and how often (ex. daily quality control checks, weekly call monitoring and call stats, quarterly performance reviews, annual surveys, etc.). Your troops will perform at their best when they have clear marching orders and timelines.
- Priorities: Provide a list of specific work duties in order of importance. Which of their tasks should take precedence over all the others? (ex. Do customer phone calls always have priority over other tasks?).
- Feedback: Don’t expect your employees to read your mind. Instead of waiting until the end of a quarter or the end of a year for a review, let them know immediately when you see great work or something that could use improvement. The sooner you provide feedback, the sooner improvements can be made and a job well done will be done again and again.
2. Give them what they need to do a good job. Making materials, equipment, information and training readily available increases speed and accuracy.
- Coaching: More than initial training is required to get great performance. It is important to provide ongoing coaching to expand and strengthen their skills. This can include continuing education, call coaching, and sharing experiences and best practices between peers and supervisors.
- Source Materials: Make information available at each employees’ finger-tips. Customer service delays caused by extra time spent searching for a resource can frustrate callers, impact your employees’ ability to respond to other calls and create customer turnover. Simply providing the right information at every workstation will eliminate these issues.
- Equipment: Ensure that all of the equipment employees need to perform their duties is in good working order (ex. headset, amplifier, monitor, keyboard, etc.). Nothing is more aggravating than working hard to do a good job only to have defective equipment get in your way.
Have you ever had a job where you didn’t know your purpose in the company, you didn’t know what was expected of you, feedback and communication was poor or non-existent, and you didn’t have the right tools to succeed? Remember how frustrating that was? Put a process in place to ensure you are not that kind of manager.
This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service, inbound call center and outsourced call center service. Her company has specialized in handling legal intake, sales leads, email lead response, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.
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