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Do you have something unique or meaningful to you that is in your office?  Maybe most people walk by it every day and ignore it but you, you look at it, maybe smile or it makes you think. When we started Expivia I read the excerpt of the "Man in the Arena" by Theodore Roosevelt and it resonated with me deeply. I wanted to get an expensive framed copy of the speech to hang so everyone could see it. 

 Because we had ZERO money at the time, (I mean ZERO) I printed out the speech on a piece of paper and framed it in a plastic frame that I found in some old boxes we had paying around. I hung that picture that day and it has never come down.  

Almost 10 years later it's there, same white paper, the same cheap frame.  Its a reminder of where we came from, how we started with nothing, all the hard work we put in. It keeps me grounded. Anytime I am having a rough day, I look at that's framed speech and it always gets me going again. 

In 1985 a small call center was started by my parents with 10 employees in Erie, Pa. It was a family business where I grew up at. I was 9 years old at the time. Business was small but steady allowing for a company with a reputation for quality to take hold. The company grew over the years and a new 75 seat center was opened up in 1990 to support an influx of new business. In those days the majority of business was dealing with outbound credit card sales for major banking institutions. When I came on board full time during college it was 1994. We had just expanded to over 200 seats and business was good. I started out with third shift positions in our IT area leaning the business from the ground up. I had to work my way up through the organization, nothing was handed to me.

The culture was that of a close knit family. Many employees were there since the start and the management team had been together for years by this time. This group of individuals were known to me as the closest of any of my family members and we treated each other that way…in those days. It was truly a great place to work with really great people.

2000’s

As the early 2000’s started to tick by the organization really hit its stride. At our peak we had over 700 employees and revenues well over 20 million dollars. Things were going very well. We had many high profile fortune 150 clients including many of the top financial institutions in the US, which as anyone in the BPO outsourcing business knows only goes to the best of the best. I was 5 years into my job of running the day to day operations of the call center floor. We implemented many of the philosophies that I have talked about in previous articles. A management trainee program was put in place which allowed us to average over 6 years of tenure for all our middle management. Turnover was very low for the call center industry due to family style culture we tried to foster. We tried to work with our associates and progress them up the ladder. Things were going great…until 2008.

2008

When the “Great Recession” hit we lost over 60% of all of our business due to financial organizations, who were now under TARP, gutting marketing budgets. It was a very difficult time. I really thought that we would get though the tough times ahead though because of the tight knit management team we had and all the battles we had fought and won in the past. By this time most of us has worked together for going on 15 years and knew each other for much longer.

That was a very naïve mistake made by myself, this time it would be different. People started to scatter, it started with our IT personnel then to our Production Staff and then to Client Services and HR. It was as if a negative wave had taken hold of our team and could not be stopped. Management went looking for new jobs at the first sign of these troubled waters.

In 2010 the company was sold

This was the most difficult and eye opening time for myself. I was still working at the place I loved. The new owners stripped me of most of my authority, being part of the past owning family meant I could not be trusted in their eyes. People I thought were my friends; people that I fought side by side with for almost 20 years were now positioning themselves for a power takeover. These were the same people we fought for and did everything we could to save their jobs when the new owners came into the picture. The same people we took into our inner circle and worked with for almost two decades turned overnight. Losing years of friendship over a little money and power was something I could not fathom at that time. Not everyone thinks as I do…Again, I was naive.

February 8, 2011

The plot was finally settled as I was driving home after work on February 8, 2011. I received a call that I was being let go. After 25 years of being a part of the company, all the new management team could muster was a 1 minute phone call. They had decided to listen to the wrong people.

That’s enough of that

The reason I tell this is not to ask for sympathy, but to tell you that what I have learned is that the saying “life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it” is a factual truth.

Instead of lying down and taking a defeat I got together with some of the decedents of the company I was let go of. Knowing we could do a better job than most of the call center industry from all the centers we had seen and worked with in the past, including the management team we were leaving, we decided to start anew.

Greatest decision that I ever made!

Expivia Interaction Marketing was born a couple months later. We decided that since we were not burdened with the overhead and cost of an older organization, we would do things differently. We would embrace new technologies that were afforded us though the cloud. We would look to the future and position ourselves in a place to capitalize on where we see customer interactions are headed 5 years from now. Social media, APP Development, video technologies, chatbot/Texting AI and world class inbound/outbound sales and service could all be fostered to grow what we think is the NEW definition of what the contact center should be in today’s market. We could reinvent ourselves, and boy did we ever.

I am not here to toot our horn to tell you how great our new company is, nor to say how cruel life can seem to be. I want to make everyone who reads this understand that the best revenge is not having bad things happen to those that harmed you, the best revenge is success!

Its up to you. No matter what has happened in the past tomorrow is a new day. Do not let the acts of others define you. Start today to become whom you were meant to be. Redefine yourself. If you can make a better widget or create a better service do it! Now is the time. I can tell you how great if feels to keep going with others say you can’t.

Every day I am so excited to be able to grow a company in our new vision. Its funny how life works, should I be mad at what I feel is a betrayal or should I be thankful for this opportunity. I choose the latter!

We like to give our readers actionable items that they can use in their own centers, not just click-bait stuff that we all probably already know. With that in mind, here are some actual ways to engage your call center associates, to make them feel part of the bigger team. It gives them a say in what is happening, which increases the morale on the floor and builds trust. Really, it helps to keep the positive culture that we strive for.

Create a Call Center Leadership Group

Among this group, call center happenings can be discussed. Having a group like this available will allow reps on the floor, and their supervisors, to know who they can go to with questions or concerns, such as a request for a new vending machine or a complaint that a particular issue is causing some headaches and needs to be addressed.

For a 300–500 seat center, you might want to create a group of 5–7 people for this. You could choose group members through seniority, or any other method that works for the type of call center you have. Your group facilitator should be a member of upper-management, who can take the information given and actually do something with it. This should also be someone who has already been engaged with the group members; someone who is already trusted and respected.

Use Your Middle Management Knowledge

The number one user of your technology from a telephony standpoint is your supervisory and middle-management teams. Other departments are looking at the tech, too; but, the supervisors and middle-management are using the technology day-in and day-out. As they are using the tech and experimenting with it daily, they develop their own really cool ways to use it that you probably don’t know about. It’s great to get the supervisors and middle-management together every couple of months for a “Tech Summit.” This meeting is where we can learn these new methods of use. Open the meeting with a question: How do you use this particular piece of tech? What are some reports that you really like and have found to be helpful? Is anyone using this particular workforce management tool?

If you learn that only one or two people are using something, it may show the need for more training on it. On the opposite end, you may learn that they are using a certain piece of technology in a way that is new and useful. With these meetings, you round out the knowledge spectrum of your entire supervisory staff while also learning what does or does not work. As upper-management, we do not use the tech day-to-day, not with the same skill sets as the reps on the floor. Engaging middle-management in this way is great for keeping the lines of communication open. They seem to enjoy teaching us new things, too.

Create Call Center Committees

Representatives from the call center floor are not often part of the supervisory group, but they could be part of another committee that is geared especially towards them. We’ve talked about games that are played on the floor previously. Reps from the call center could be part of the committee that creates and decides which games will be played. You could even be like The Office and create a Party Committee. This group would be great to help plan rewards and incentives and would tie in nicely with the Games Committee.

An Equipment Committee can be really valuable. One of the biggest mistakes upper management makes is to change a piece of equipment with no input from those who will be using it. If the new item is hated, the culture you have worked so hard to build will go downhill fast, so rep buy-in for the new items is a must. Having a committee to go to when you want to buy a new headset is useful. It may be cheaper, but the committee can tell you that the sample you gave them is uncomfortable which will lead to disgruntled reps and wasted money.

Use Social Media to Engage!

How does your company use its social media? Consider dedicating one of your social media assets strictly to employee engagement. For Expivia, our private Facebook group (not the business page) has nothing to do with selling, commercials, or really even promoting the brand. It is specifically there to engage our employees. It is home to pictures from the call center, information about games, and as a way to build camaraderie. It is a great way to keep everyone happily engaged, but it is also something we can show our clients-like, this is the team that works for us, look at how much they enjoy what they do.

Recently, we had a Water Pong tournament-yes, it’s just like the other kind of Pong, but work-place friendly. With this tournament, the winners received $150 each and a vacation day; second place got a vacation day, so everyone wanted to win. We used Facebook Live to stream the tournament to TVs in the call center for those who couldn’t leave the floor. Being able to watch the competition, even if they couldn’t cheer on their friends in person, was still a great way to promote that positive culture.

Rotate Management Trainees/Reps into other Departments

All of our management trainees have to take a week or two in another department. They work in Client Services, IT, Quality Assurance, etc. They get to find out about all the different facets of the company and how their piece of the pie fits into other areas. It is important to have reps do this, too. We try to keep one rep in each department at any time. Having a rep in the QA department is a great experience for them. They get to see firsthand how monitoring and scoring are done. They are then able to explain to reps on the floor that the QA team isn’t out to get them-they are just following a checklist regarding call quality to make sure the reps are hitting certain markers on each call.

We also use “Supervisor for a Day.” We will run some sort of motivator with the reps and whoever wins the motivation gets off of the floor and shadows their supervisor for the day. They go through the whole day together, from the morning meeting to QA checks and monitoring. It allows them to see exactly what a person in that supervisory role does. If the motivator was based on quality, chances are the person who wins is someone you were already looking at for a possible supervisory or a management trainee program. “Supervisor for a Day” is a good way to not only gauge their interest but to also get a feeling if they are the right person for a job that might be coming open in the future.

Employees and middle-management want to be engaged with you while also feeling like they have been heard. All five of these ideas are ways to do just that. Feeling heard keeps your culture positive, which keeps your turnover rate lower, your quality higher, and your customer experience gets better.

It’s only fair to share…

If you are interested in call center operations content, we have a pretty cool call center ops podcast you can check out here: