Can you shape a culture if you’re not the CEO?
When assessing what makes leading companies tick, corporate culture is a common element. Take Apple, Google, Zappos, Southwest Airlines or USAA; they are all known for strong, customer-centric cultures that feature a supportive environment where employees can do their best work. Components of a high-performing culture include transparency, collaboration, recognition of value, partnership, teamwork and trust. Put more simply: Corporate culture is how people work together to deliver results.
Every company aspires to create a thriving corporate culture, but many fall short. The truth is that it requires hard work on a continuous basis to maintain such an environment, and every part of the organization has a role to play. As the department most aligned with customer experience, the contact center is uniquely positioned to be a major contributor to corporate culture.
That may seem like a lofty or unrealistic aspiration—until you consider the influence that the contact center’s position naturally bestows on it. More than any other department, contact centers are on the front lines of projecting a company’s brand. Agents “walk the walk” of culture on a daily basis. With every call, email, text or tweet, contact center employees make decisions and interact with customers in ways that directly affect—and reflect—the organization’s culture.
All of the work done by departments from operations, IT, marketing and communications to sales and business development comes together in the contact center, whose agents are often the literal voice and face of the company. I remember this well from my time as the executive responsible for a 250-person contact center at Nicor National, where our work affected the company’s entire rebranding effort. We earned the reputation as exhibiting positivity at work, and that in turn helped us influence other parts of the organization.
So how can you ensure that the good work you’re doing extends beyond the walls of the contact center to influence your company’s culture? First, you must ensure that the contact center properly embodies the culture that your company aspires to. Next, you should look for ways to communicate the value the contact center delivers to the organization. Once you have established your credibility, it will be easier to present the contact center as a strategic and operational partner.
Promoting Culture in the Contact Center
Unlike many departments, the contact center has the luxury of functioning as its own ecosystem. Due to the nature of the work, contact centers often have their own bespoke floor or facility. While this separation can limit interaction with the rest of the organization, it also gives contact center leaders the ability to create a setting that embodies corporate culture. Three aspects of the contact center’s environment can help align employees around the intended principles, values and behaviors.
1. Physical environment
We have probably all experienced contact centers that are bland, depressing, uninspiring places. Elements such as natural light, color, open workspaces, cleanliness, ergonomic furniture, and standing desks can all reinforce the idea that agents are doing critical work. Such intangibles can make a huge different in morale, agent retention and performance.
2. Communications
Ensuring that agents feel their opinions and needs are heard is vital. Contact center leaders have a bevy of channels available to them, including email, company intranets, town halls, coaching huddles and team meetings. In addition, a number of new apps and tools (such as Bonfyre, CultureAMP, 15Five and WeThrive, to name a few) can facilitate communication and support employee engagement. While these tools are important, leaders that make an effort at informal interactions—spontaneous coaching and feedback, lunch in the breakroom, walking the halls—can reinforce cultural attributes on a more personal basis.
3. Emotional environment
Agents must routinely bear the brunt of customer ire due to the organization’s failings, and these actions can take their toll. Sending a clear signal that agents are supported and that their work is valued can help to establish a healthy balance. Investing in a voice of the employee (VOE) program can ensure that agents are being heard, and cross-departmental ambassadors can work together to solve recurring issues together. Other efforts, such as recognizing top performers and establishing career paths for call center functions, can further increase employee satisfaction and engagement.
Injecting Positive Culture into the Organization
A high-performing contact center has many ways to engage with departments across the enterprise to demonstrate how culture contributes to positive business outcomes. Since business unit leaders and department heads may not understand how frontline agents can support their own efforts, finding ways to measure the value the contact center generates, and communicating it clearly, are critical. Contact centers typically focus on metrics such as handle times, but in my experience an ROI model that links customer engagement to key metrics (such as customer attrition) and correlates them with cost per sale and earnings makes more sense. Remember: the key is finding metrics that every executive understands and cares about.
Hard data on contact center performance can be used as an entry point to forge connections with department heads, both to make them aware of how your function is supporting their goals and to establish credibility when customer issues crop up. As a contact center leader, when an employee would come to me with a problem caused by a specific department—for example, a billing error that may have been replicated for hundreds or thousands of customers—my first move was to call the department head. By acting as the first line of defense, the contact center increases visibility into operations across the enterprise and acts as an early warning system for customer-service issues.
It’s also important to provide executives from across the organization with transparency into the contact center and how it functions. This outreach sends the signal that the contact center values openness and collaborative problem-solving—key attributes of an effective corporate culture. During my tenure, I invited our general counsel to observe customer engagement and call resolution. When he heard the length of the verbal disclaimer that all agents had to read to customers, he was appalled and inquired who had developed the disclaimer language. When I told him it was his department, he was anxious to work together, and we shortened the language considerably.
Another way the contact center can spread culture is by moving from a transactional mindset to thinking more proactively about customer interactions and what they reveal about internal operations. By taking a step back and devoting time to connect the dots, particularly with the assistance of a voice of customer (VOC) initiative, agents cannot only identify issues but also take the next step to notify their managers of trends or problems. Say, for example, that customers went online to pay their bills but the website wasn’t working, causing a spike in call volume. Contact centers without the benefit of speech and call analytics might not detect the source of the problem. But with a robust VOC/VOE tool, managers can quickly recognize the problem and reach out to the relevant departments to address the problem (in this case, IT to repair the website).
The more proactive outreach a contact center performs, the greater the likelihood that its leaders will be included to develop strategy and improve operations, helping to break down internal walls and affirm cultural pillars such as teamwork and shared purpose.
The Contact Center Is Where Brand Collides with Reality
Your brand represents the image you want to present to the public, and the contact center is where that brand collides with reality. Without a corporate culture girded by selected values and principles, customer interactions can often reveal what’s really going on in an organization.
It’s no secret that contact centers can leave an indelible mark on customer satisfaction and retention; what’s less recognized is the impact the function can have in instituting and reinforcing a corporate culture and spreading it throughout the enterprise. For leaders who create an optimal environment for the contact center to flourish, its high performance and embrace of the company’s principles can serve as a positive example for all.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Heidrick & Struggles.