Showcasing Your Team’s Value to Executive Management

Have you ever found yourself in a management meeting or performance calibration session representing your contact center team? You go into the meeting confident in your team’s performance, but as the meeting progresses, your stomach begins to sink. You hear your contact center team being undervalued, with reasons such as being labeled a cost center, having a large team compared to other units, or most of your staff being at lower salary grades. You passionately advocate for your team, presenting compelling arguments, only to have them dismissed. Tools, resources, and recognition are then allocated to other units, leaving you feeling frustrated and demoralized. How do you explain this to your team?

When your team is undervalued, it cuts deep. In addition, the ramifications are profound, leading to consequences like underfunding, loss of talent, and underperformance. Though company cultures vary, effectively showcasing your team’s value to executive management is a crucial strategy to combat undervaluation. Here are some tips.

Connect Your Contact Center Metrics to Business Impact

Your goal is to establish a clear link between your team’s activities and their impact on crucial business metrics, like revenue and profit. Organizations set strategic objectives to achieve growth, expansion, and profitability. It is crucial to demonstrate how your contact center performance metrics contribute to achieving these objectives. While a sales-oriented team can easily connect revenue generation, other metrics are equally important. Customer satisfaction scores, retention rates, referral rates, resolution rates, etc. all play a significant role in influencing key strategic objectives. Your responsibility is to articulate to the executive team the interconnected nature of these metrics. For example, an increase in your team’s customer satisfaction score resulted in a boost in sales. Or a team member’s high customer satisfaction score resulted in a completed purchase or a successful upsell.

Create Dashboards Showing Key Metrics

The next step is to create high-level dashboards accessible to the executive team. Your dashboard can be in real-time or on an agreed-upon reporting frequency. The dashboard equips executives to conveniently review your team’s performance and connect it to business wins. An effective dashboard is easy to read, understand, and navigate. Utilize charts, tables, images, icons, and colors effectively to connect your contact center metrics to business impact.

Showcase Positive Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials are very powerful tools to demonstrate impact and drive the value of your contact center team. These testimonials can be in written, recorded, or video formats. They can be sourced from customer feedback surveys, reviews on your website/app, or by reaching out to customers directly. Share these testimonials within your organization and prominently feature them in your contact center reports, whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly. These testimonials not only demonstrate how your team’s efforts contribute to revenue generation and customer satisfaction but also positively impact the organization’s brand and reputation.

Tell a Story

Share impactful stories within the organization through emails or newsletters. These stories can include difficult customer interactions, challenging customer requests, transforming a negative experience into customer loyalty, etc. Create your own customer experience newsletter sharing stories from your team members’ perspectives. These stories highlight not only your team’s exceptional skills but also their dedication, passion, and commitment to go above and beyond for both customers and the organization. Remember to incorporate feedback and stories from other internal teams that collaborate with your team to achieve positive customer outcomes. These voices serve as powerful advocates, confirming the significant impact your team delivers.

Invite Executive Management to Visit

Invite executive managers to visit your contact center and speak with your team members. This provides the executive team with an opportunity to connect with your team members on a personal level, seeing them as individuals who are passionate about the company’s success rather than viewing them solely as a cost center. This can be challenging, consider incorporating it as one of the activities during the International Customer Service Week celebration.

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Use these strategies to get started on demonstrating the value of your contact center team to your C-suite. As you continue to gather feedback from your executive management, carefully interpret their insights, and refine your tools and strategies for ongoing improvement.