Being agile is no longer enough, we believe the agile principles will always have a place in the ways teams work, but it should be one part of a much broader approach to how we lead the modern contact centre.
The world today is best described as disruptive, best laid plans are often turned upside down and yet we still have goals and aspirations that we want to fulfil.
So how do we achieve our business goals and successfully deal with the unexpected events that throw us into firefighting mode?
The answer to become adaptive. It’s a way of designing, working and leading contact centres that focuses on building the capability to thrive no matter what the change is.
The best way to think about this, is like the automatic software updates on your phone.
With each update you get a better, more capable phone, faster, longer battery life, and ready for all the new features. All this is achieved with very little downtime.
So, if this was your culture, you would have an advantage, you would always be ready. Now being ready, may not sound that exciting, but it means that no matter what change, disruption, or goal you have, your team will be able to sense, adapt and respond faster and with greater success.
And it goes one step further, adaptive teams are constantly learning about how to adapt. And this is the real gold, resulting in continual updates to their operating system, making them even more adaptive over time. So, when a disruption hits your your team, rather than being derailed, you keep moving towards your goals, happier and healthier.
And we believe that happier and healthier can coexist with the achievement of business goals, rather than having to being traded off.
These are the key traits of an adaptive culture:
High trust, psychologically safety teams who can call out mistakes and share ideas with confidence.
Transparency – data, information and feedback are shared freely.
Autonomy – the people that do the work, own the work and are given the control to make decisions in the best interests of customers.
Collaborative - everyone wins and loses together, siloes are broken down.
Authentic – everyone can be themselves, not just a version they need to be for work.
Curiosity and learning – they are always learning, adaptive cultures cannot survive for long without constant input. They look outside and inside for better ways of working.
Creative – they explore ideas no matter who raised them and rather than saying no, they have a ‘yes, and’ mindset.
Experimental - failure is celebrated and when new ideas are tested they make it safe to fail.
Focus on personal development – they recognise that the energy and motivation for work, comes from what motivates and enriches you outside of work.
Adaptive teams don't have these as posters on a wall, they are woven into the fabric of how they work, relate and think. This is more messy than it is orderly, less planned than you might like, but the result is hands down, the best culture you can work in.
The key benefits are:
- The ability to adapt quickly to change, change is seen as a positive and embedded successfully, resulting in greater business and customer benefits.
- Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty as a result of removing unnecessary calls.
- Higher employee engagement and lower attrition as a result of employee experiences designed around your unique value proposition.
- Higher performance through better collaboration and a shared view of success.
- Lower operating costs due to fewer calls, less rework, lower recruitment costs.
Creating this culture combines a range of sustainable practices and mindsets that create the ability to adapt rapidly to change.
5 things you can do today to build an adaptive, agile contact centre:
1. Flexibility: provide as much choice as you can on where and when your team can work. This will reduce absenteeism, attrition and help you attract the best people in the market.
2. Learning: run Retrospectives regularly to uncover improvement opportunities. Teams that are more engaged in how to improve the environment they work in, feel more accountable, leading to better performance.
3. Trust: increase psychological safety, do a quick pulse check to see how comfortable people are in speaking up to share ideas, report mistakes and provide feedback up the line. Cultures with high psychological safety perform better because they talk about mistakes openly, so they can course correct faster and take advantage of new opportunities that come from sharing ideas.
4. Protecting time for connection: in a busy contact centre the first thing that will be traded off, is time for people to come together, 1-1’s, team meetings and socialising. The ability to come together and get personal is one of the most valued activities, it prevents isolation and shows that you value your people for what they can bring to the culture, rather than simply doing the job.
5. Increase feedback: in particular, peer to peer feedback on what people do well. The modern contact centre is a busy place, and customer interactions can be tough, making it critical that your people can bounce back quickly and safely. Providing positive feedback has been shown to improve retention and employee satisfaction by up to 30%, it works by giving people the energy and reason to overcome challenges they face every day.
Bringing to life the traits of adaptive cultures is at the heart of an agile and adaptive contact centre, it’s an ongoing commitment from leaders to create a humanistic, customer-centric climate that values the worth of every person.
