(a.k.a. What Should You Be Doing Right Now to Improve Your Center?)
In this series, we will answer the single most important question, What should you be doing right now to improve the overall sales performance of your agents and your center?
Tip # 1: Conduct Your First Performance Check of the Morning
It is 10:00am and You are in the Middle of Your Morning Shift
What should you be doing right now to improve your sales? We can assume your pre-shift meeting is done and you have already met with your own boss and senior center leadership. Lets also figure that you have finished the slew of e-mails you have received and you can probably take a break from that until after lunch.
So what should you be doing right now?
Check in on your teams performance. Some people will call you a micro manager, but you are only a micro manager if you do this more than six-seven times in a day, which most supervisors do not have time to do.
We recommend at least several check-ins with your agents. How are they feeling? How are they doing compared to the goals you agreed to? This means two things. How are they doing in overall sales for the day so far and how are they doing on the skill goals you set for them (e.g. Start sounding more energized at the beginning of the call.).
If your pre-shift meeting occurred at 8:30am, 10:00a, is a good time to check in with everyone. Perhaps you can do this in twos and threes. Maybe you can get half the team to talk to you for five minutes. Check in early so only 25% of the day will have gone by at this point. Here is why.
If you wait until lunch time, half of your productive day is already gone. By then, agents who have performed at a subpar level will already be feeling like this day is going badly for them and the end result, barring a miracle, is going to be a low sales day. You can eliminate a lot of these negative thinking cycles by catching them midway through the first half of the day, around the time of that first morning break.
Agents need to feel a sense of accountability. They need to believe they control their own destiny and a good or bad sales day is up to them, not up to luck or circumstances. If you can reach out to them early enough, like 10:00 am, you still have 75% of the day available for agents to get on track and get focused, if they are struggling.
Start with a great pre-shift and then check in early. This is one of the easiest ways to make sure agents know you are serious. You will find a lot more responsiveness out of your struggling agents now, rather than waiting until lunch time or even later in the day.
Tags: better floor management, improved agent coaching, improved sales results, inspect agent performance, proven coaching techniques, supervisor techniques