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December 02, 2008

How to reach call center employees

A client just e-mailed this question:
“Are you aware of studies that show how call center employees—most of whom are under 30, female, and have only a couple of years’ experience—want to be communicated with?”

Answer:
Most of the employees in this workforce are Millennials—born between 1980 and 2000—but those over age 28 are GenXers (born between 1965 and 1980).

So a good place to start would be to find out more about both those generational cohorts. For example, there was an excellent 60 Minutes segment on Millennials that provides a profile of this demographic group.

Segments and articles like these help you learn overall characteristics of these cohorts. For example, both GenXers and Millennials are more comfortable with technology than Baby Boomers—and, in fact, in many cases they prefer a high-tech solution (especially if it’s fast-acting) to an old-fashioned tactic.

But it’s risky to build your entire communication strategy on demographic information alone. That’s why we always recommend conducting at least a modest amount of internal research to supplement the trend data. For instance, at one company with a call center, we learned that employees almost never use e-mail: Whenever workers are on their computers, they’ve got “selling windows” open.

At another company, we found out that call center employees’ favorite communication channel was old-fashioned bulletin boards. Why? Managers had gotten into the habit of using bulletin boards to post objectives, key strategies and results—and employees had grown to like this simple way of conveying essential information.

I’m giving you the same advice we gave our client: Want to know how to most effectively communicate with call center employees? Ask them—they’ll tell you.

Posted by Alison Davis at December 2, 2008 04:38 PM

Comments

Posted by: snapcomms at December 3, 2008 05:43 PM

Posted by: matthew at December 4, 2008 08:40 AM