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Kathy and Dave discuss the latest details on Quiet Quitting and how engaging your employees can make the difference.
In this series we will discuss Contact Center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
[00:00:00] Dave Hoekstra: Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're here, joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
[00:00:20] Dave Hoekstra: My name is Dave Hoekstra, Product Evangelist for Calabrio, and my guest.
today is Kathy Sobus from ConvergeOne. Kathy is the Senior Director of Customer Experience Strategy. Which is a great title to be talking about what we want to kind of hit today, especially around the idea of employee engagement. You know, we talk a lot about employee engagement.
[00:00:39] Dave Hoekstra: And I laugh because back when I first started in this industry, employee engagement meant you had a job, sit down, shut up and take calls. But now employee engagement takes such a different approach. So Kathy, it's really great to have you here. And so let me kind of ask just right off the bat. What do you do for Converge one?
[00:00:57] Dave Hoekstra: And tell us a little bit about Converge One and how you guys kind of help fulfill the destiny of contact centers and around employee engagement and customer experience.
[00:01:05] Kathy Sobus: Thanks Dave. It's great to be here with you today and joining your podcast. You know, when we think about employee engagement and we think about the customer's experience, happy customers come from happy agents.
[00:01:17] Kathy Sobus: And so how we take care of the agents that we have, how we grow them in their in their careers, and just make sure that we're doing the best job we can to keep happy, satisfied agents as something that we're doing and something that we really like within the portfolio we have available to us from Calabrio.
[00:01:37] Kathy Sobus: You know, those employees are remote today, some of them. Some of them are back in the office, and some of them have a mixture of both, where they're in the office for a couple of days, but then home for the remainder of the week. So it's hard to engage with your employees when they're not there in front of you all the time and you can't see them.
[00:01:54] Kathy Sobus: And talk to them about what they're feeling and what their experience is with your organization. So we do we take this very seriously. I think next year is gonna be the year of the agent. And talking about employees and how we keep happy employees with our companies.
[00:02:11] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. Isn't it funny how.
[00:02:12] Dave Hoekstra: Not necessarily just with contact centers, but any customer service organization, right? Whether it be the fast food restaurant you frequent on the way home from work, or, you know, a really nice high end, let's say purse store or something along those lines. Isn't it funny how you can almost immediately tell whether or not they take care of their employees when you engage with them.
[00:02:34] Kathy Sobus: Indeed.
[00:02:34] Kathy Sobus: Right. And I think that comes from the culture of the company and how they how they take care of, like you say, their employees and how their employees take care of the customers that are coming through the doors as well. You know, we find this often when we're bumping around and we're. You know, buying our goods and services, or someone comes to our door to provide us something in our own homes.
[00:02:57] Kathy Sobus: Are they really engaged? Are they really excited about being there? And how does that translate into your experience?
[00:03:05] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about. First of all, before we get too deep into the day to day here tell us a little bit about ConvergeOne and you know, what is it that, what is the general idea of how ConvergeOne helps with this piece?
[00:03:18] Dave Hoekstra: And then maybe some specific things that that in your purview that you are working on to help really turn that customer experience into a positive.
[00:03:27] Kathy Sobus: Thank you. ConvergeOne is a systems integrator. We work with a variety of different platforms, particularly in the customer experience base of which I'm a part, but we also have other practices here at ConvergeOne.
[00:03:40] Kathy Sobus: One for our customers. So we've got a cyber security practice, we have a data center practice, and we have a collaboration practice. Specific to customer experience and something that I've been studying for a long time. The different vendors that we work with and the different elements that we talk about.
[00:03:57] Kathy Sobus: What's important, what are the trends that we're seeing out there in the marketplace? When we look at our customer base, it's a little different than when we look at the trends that are available to us from the different analysts that are out there that are talking to everyone about what they're seeing.
[00:04:14] Kathy Sobus: So sometimes they're similar, sometimes they're not. And with regard to employees and employee engagement, thinking about how all of the different products and solutions that a contact center employee has to go through in order to take care of your customer. We have solutions in all of those various verticals.
[00:04:33] Kathy Sobus: So whether it's routing, whether it's workforce engagement management, and the great stuff that Calabrio does with us, or whether it's CRM systems with our Salesforce practice, those are the things that we care most deeply about and bringing together terrific solutions that help our clients shine in the area of customer experience.
[00:04:54] Dave Hoekstra: So one of the cooler things about being a systems integrator, right? If we can get a little nerdy with the term is that, you know, when you are an SI you work with multiple groups, multiple verticals, multiple different things, right? You're not kind of locked into this is the only thing that we work with. You kind of get a chance to see a breadth of options across
[00:05:17] Dave Hoekstra: different things, and I'm interested to see, you know, is there is there something you're seeing out in the marketplace that is really pointing towards great employee engagement process? Right? We're gonna talk a little bit about the great resignation and quiet quitting and all that. But in preface to that, what kind of tools or what kind of things are you seeing out there that really focus on making sure that the employee isfelt that they are treated appropriately and make them wanna stay with an organization. Anything, any good examples? Yeah.
[00:05:50] Kathy Sobus: Not only wanna stay, but wanna join an organization to begin with. Right? So what's the great buzz that's going on out there regarding the company and what is your face out there to the marketplace as you're trying to hire new people and retain those that you currently have?
[00:06:06] Kathy Sobus: So, yes, lots of tools are available and lots of things. You may not have thought about in the past, right? So if we take a look at the employee and specifically at the contact center agent, what are we asking them to do all day long? What does that really look like? And each customer's gonna be different.
[00:06:26] Kathy Sobus: Each client that we work with is going to be a little bit different as well. So I've walked into client environments. A contact center agent has to manipulate 12 to 14 screens. During the course of a day. Right. And sometimes the tasks are routine and mundane. They're copying and pasting from one thing to another all on behalf of the customer.
[00:06:48] Kathy Sobus: So not only is that. Kind of a tough job to do all day long, every day. But it could be kind of boring too. So is there a way that a systems integrator like us can streamline that process, present a single pane of glass to that agent so that they can handle that customer more expediently than they could in the past?
[00:07:08] Kathy Sobus: We have other tools too that I'm sure Dave, you and I are gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about workforce engagement management, workforce management. Shift bidding thinking about now people that are back to work and they have to nip and back to school and have to manage different schedules than they did perhaps during the summer.
[00:07:28] Kathy Sobus: How are they doing that so that they can meet their needs of their children, their families, and doing it in a way that makes them feel like a valued employee instead of having To scout around and ask, Hey, can you switch with me? Right? Putting that empowerment in their hands I think is a very important thing to.
[00:07:45] Kathy Sobus: The other one that I see that really sprouts up here is automatic quality management and being able to look at all of the interactions that an employee is doing and not just piece parting them out and not looking at just a random sampling that's probably less than 5% of the work that they're doing, so that you're getting a true indicator as to how your employee is doing, like traditionally we've been doing, but also how are they feeling?
What are the sentiments around that? And taking that and changing up the coaching model a bit, I think is where our clients need to go. Right. How do you coach people differently now than you did before?
[00:08:25]
Dave Hoekstra: Well, absolutely. I, you know, I think that's, it's so timely that the mode of focus has now switched from agents, catching agents doing something wrong, or even looking at agents and, you know, even the good organizations were like, well, we're trying to find training opportunities and we're trying to find coaching opportunities. Right. And that is important. But the mode has now switched.
[00:08:51] Dave Hoekstra: From the word agent to customer, right? It's now about how can we make the customer experience better through our agents as opposed to how do we make our agents better? And it's so interesting the tools that are available today. I would've absolutely just been a kid in a candy store back in the early two thousands if I had access to some of these tools that I could've have. Analyzed what, not the, not just the customers but the agents were saying and really being able to find those trends and things like that.
And those are so important, but putting it back into the lens of employee engagement, I mean, it was so frustrating back in the day to be to just feel like the tools
[00:09:34] Dave Hoekstra: didn't service what the idea of what we're trying to do. And so that leads to kind of the next piece is, you know, we started with the great resignation, then we changed our mind, right? It's not the great resignation, it's the great reshuffling, right?
And so it's not people just leaving they're being moved on to this place that shows better and in these tools and we're starting to really. See organizations with titles like you have, Right? Customer Experience Strategy or, you know, even I spoke with an organization like yesterday that has an employee engagement strategist, right? They're somebody whose job it is to make sure that the employees are engaged. That's rare.
[00:10:14] Dave Hoekstra: You don't find that too often, but we're starting to see those things. But the newest term, the newest and latest, greatest is quiet. Quit. Right. , so, , how familiar are you? Explain to us what quiet quitting is and where that comes from.
[00:10:28] Kathy Sobus: Quiet, quitting, and now even quiet firing, which I don't wanna go there today.
[00:10:32] Kathy Sobus: It happens. It's happening, right? And it's a real problem. You know, In July of this year, resignation rates jump to from anywhere from thirty to a hundred percent according to the Boston Consulting Group. And that's, to me, that's no surprise, right? There's tons of volume coming in. We're asking people to do more and more all the time.
[00:10:53] Kathy Sobus: Customers are a bit stressed out. There's long wait times out there and not the ability for a customer to perhaps at the way they wanted to. So, it's no surprise to me that customers, you know, when that five o'clock bell rings, they're gonna disengage. or they might even be disengaging during the day.
[00:11:12] Kathy Sobus: You know, last week I was out talking to a group of people, an industry event, and I just said, just around the room, just nod. You don't have to raise your hand. How many of you know somebody that has quietly quit and everyone in the room nod their head? Everyone. Now, I didn't go on to say, Are you one of those?
[00:11:29] Kathy Sobus: I really kind of wanted to ask that question, but I didn't ask that question. I said to them, how many employees do you. Not know that have quietly quit. , how many are there out there that are just not engaging in the work that we'd like them to do. And then on behalf of the customer, you know, working.
[00:11:47] Kathy Sobus: To their optimum all the time. Every day. Right. And you know, if I added onto that, NBC found that 75% of the people think customer service has gotten worse over the last couple years. Well, that's not good. And so when you couple on quiet quitting with the experiences that we're having out there, the numbers are just staggering.
[00:12:08] Kathy Sobus: Right.
[00:12:09] Dave Hoekstra: I was gonna say you know, Calabrio just released our State of the Contact Center report for 2022. And one of the, and this is I'm such a bad podcast host cause I don't know this off the top of my head. I should have this in front of me, but I don't. But the actual number is something like, 83% of contact center managers think that they are delivering the appropriate customer experience, but it, from the customer's perspective, it's only 30 some odd percent.
[00:12:38] Dave Hoekstra: I mean, that's a huge discrepancy between the two audiences and we at Calabrio and working with ConvergeOne we talk a lot about the term brand guardian. How do we turn these customer experience advocates, Our agents, the people who are working the front lines, How do we turn them into being these guardians of our brand to make sure that we're putting that out in front, and I know that you just you just collaborated with us on a blog post, Right?
That's available @calabrio.com if you want to check that out. I did. Yeah, that talks about this idea of creating and supporting those brand guardians, and it goes directly along with what we're kind of talking about now.
[00:13:17] Dave Hoekstra: So, what are some of the key findings maybe that, the blog talks about?
[00:13:21] Kathy Sobus: Yeah, so let's start by, first of all, I love the term congratulations to you guys, right? For coming up with Brand Guardian and if you just think about the language of that terminology and what it means.
[00:13:33] Kathy Sobus: This, these are your frontline workers, right? These are the people that are face to face with your customer. They are absolutely your brand ambassador, and that's where your relationship is with your customer. And so, and we all know, you know, one bad interaction can have viral implications, not only for the customer, but also for the agents.
[00:13:56] Kathy Sobus: So the brand is gonna suffer as a result of that. I like to think of this as coupling in with the quiet, quitting piece. And if half of the workforce, which a recent Gallup poll showed half of the workforce is quiet, quit. Right now. So they're not going above and beyond. We got a real problem out here, right?
[00:14:14] Kathy Sobus: We better take a good hard look at this and see how this affects us. And so the blog and thank you. I'm really glad that I was able to work on that and collaborate with you, but the blog really talks to what this. Issue is and starts to give you ways of thinking about taking care of it differently than what you are today.
[00:14:34] Kathy Sobus: Mentioned a couple of the products and solutions that you, that Calabrio has. But I think a lot of this is cultural. . And a lot of this is putting not only the customer at the center of everything you do, but your brand ambassador, your brand guardian at the center of everything you do. And if you start to think about them that way, you've got the ability then to think differently about how you work with them, how you empower them, and how you engage with them so that they stay with your company and they're not quietly quitting around you.
[00:15:07] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, the concept of creating a brand guardian is actually kind of easy, right? When you think about it, it's What we've noticed, and probably you have noticed as well, is that organizations have to commit to it, and that's usually the hard part is how do you commit to a long term strategy to help these frontline advocates turn into brand guardians, right?
That's the thing. You know, I spent a lot of time in sales and I honestly believe that if I truly love a product, I can sell it. But most of these people that are working for these organizations, do they truly believe. That this brand that they're supposed to be defending is worth defending.
[00:15:48] Dave Hoekstra: And when you can't get a day off to save your life when there's 35 calls in queue, the entire time you work you know, every, like you said, I have 14 screens to deal with and I have to copy paste 35 things in every call to get it from here to here. At the end of the day, I'm like, Yeah, I don't, I'm not really feeling super energized to defend this brand.
[00:16:09] Dave Hoekstra: So, These tools that are available to a lot of these organizations, it kind of seems like most of the time the problem is not that they don't want to do this, it's that they're just not committing to that. Was, is that something you would you agree with?
[00:16:23] Kathy Sobus: Yeah, I completely agree. They're disengaged, right?
[00:16:26] Kathy Sobus: So they're apathetic at best. They don't care one way or another. They don't hate your brand, but they don't love it either. They're just showing up, doing a job and then leaving for the day and not giving it any more thought, and that affects the people around them, and it certainly affects your customers as well.
[00:16:43] Dave Hoekstra: I saw this really great thread on the internet. Maybe you've heard of it, the internet that it was a question that was proposed to people who used to work in the food service industry, especially waiters and waitresses. Right? And the question was, what did you do to increase the size of your tips?
[00:17:04] Dave Hoekstra: Right? What are the things that you discovered over the course of time that you worked? And one of the very, very recurring themes in that is, I got better tips when something was messed up and I fixed it as opposed to just it being right the first time. Right? If I was able to go out
[00:17:23] Dave Hoekstra: you know, not like they're messing things up on purpose, although I'm sure it happened, but it was, I got a better tip when the food was wrong and I corrected it, or, you know, the drink needed to be, and I apologized and came back and it's such a microcosm of what we deal with this brand guardian.
[00:17:41] Dave Hoekstra: Type of idea is you're never gonna be able to keep everybody happy all the time. But if you you know, there's that keyword that keeps coming up when we talk about this. When you empower people to write the wrongs, you create you create these loyal people of your brand, and then it's the same thing.
[00:17:59] Dave Hoekstra: With your agents with your people, right? You're not gonna be able to always give them everything that they ever want. You're not gonna be able to give them that raise at the right time. You're not gonna be able to give them the day off. But when you come back and you make things right. That's what really creates these loyal brand guardians.
[00:18:18] Dave Hoekstra: And I think that's a big part of what we like to talk about here at Calabrio and work with with the team at Convergeone is, what tools are out there? Did you, is there anything specific that you saw what, you know, when you have a customer that you know is maybe interested in kind of , re-engaging this and working towards, what are some of the specific things that you might see out there that they could do to kind of create these loyal brand guardians?
[00:18:43] Kathy Sobus: Yeah, we're talking to a lot of clients about different things, right? How to enhance their self-service. Today is one of the things that we're working toward. And we have lots of clients out there that have open recs out there to to hire people and they can't get them filled. There aren't enough people that are interested in working for that company to fill those recs Well, that's a, that's an issue.
[00:19:07] Kathy Sobus: And I don't think that, You know, specific to one customer or one vertical or one industry that's systemic throughout our environment that we're faced with. So how do we get these folks re-engaged and how do we get them happy? And empowerment is one of the ways to do it, but also culturally allowing them to see.
[00:19:27] Kathy Sobus: What impact they have on the rest of the business I think is very important, right? If you're in a large corporation and you feel like you're lost in the shuffle as an employee and you don't really know the value that you bring to that organization, then you might have more of a propensity to disengage.
[00:19:47] Kathy Sobus: And how do you find out those things are through analytics. As well. , Right? So we talked about workforce management tools that empower agents. We talked about you know, assessing all of the work that they do on an even par throughout the day, week, month, year you know, as an empowerment tool and shifting a little bit more around.
[00:20:07] Kathy Sobus: How you evaluate. And instead of evaluating them, actually coaching them, actually making them feel like they're important as an employee and helping them do better and then gageing how it's going. So the analytics piece of the interaction helps with that. It helps with resolution too. And there's another important characteristic.
[00:20:28] Kathy Sobus: It's not just the agents, it's their supervisors. How are the supervisors doing through this whole process too? Do they feel empowered? What do their teams look like? If you have a team of superstars, take a look at their supervisor and see how that supervisors working with that team. Right. If you have a team of people that aren't you know, doing things the way they need to do or work through that, then how do you shift that?
[00:20:53] Kathy Sobus: Right? How do you shift that out and help coach the supervisors too? So coaching to be a brand ambassador is something I think. We need to explore a little bit more fully and a brand guardian and helping the supervisors and agents in that area.
[00:21:09] Dave Hoekstra: Well, that's the feedback we get so often and questions from
prospective customers and just people that we meet out on a day to day basis is, I just don't know. I just don't know what to focus on. Right. It's, you know, Right. Old school contact center approach. Is, you look at the objective numbers, right? You look at your service level, you look at your average speed of answer.
[00:21:33] Dave Hoekstra: You look at nps, you look at, you know, handle time after call work, right? Those, right, those really fun terms that I mean, basically made my entire career. But things have changed so much from back then because now. You know, the average organization only really pays attention to, at best 2% of their interactions.
[00:21:55] Dave Hoekstra: Right? And so, at best, I mean, and I went through an exercise a couple weeks ago with a group of people and I said, Let's do the math. And not one person, top 1%, if they, you know, the entire room of people nobody got over 1% of their interactions being monitored. When you spend some time thinking about how little we actually know about what's truly going on and then how that information can be spread beyond just the contact center as beneficial. Right. When we talk about marketing departments, we talk about sales, we talk about customer experience as a whole, right? That, that trickles down. Right. That trickles down to the agent themselves and how if we can provide them.
[00:22:39] Dave Hoekstra: With the right information. I like to tell the story of when I was an agent and I, it was burned into my head. We were only allowed to give a credit of up to $35. Now, this was in 1997 too, so Right. $35 was and anything more than that, we had to go to our supervisor, and I'll give you one guess what my success rate was of going to my supervisor and getting a credit of more than $35.
[00:23:03] Dave Hoekstra: It was a hundred percent. Yeah, right. Every single time I went there. And so it was like you could, you can understand the argument, but. What we never had access to was why are we giving those credits? We could look at how many we would and what agents gave the most, but nobody ever understood why. Now we can understand why.
[00:23:22] Dave Hoekstra: We can understand the what's being said that leads to those credits, what phrases what terms are being used, and that's then we can turn around and we can provide specific coaching to these agents. We can provide
[00:23:34] Kathy Sobus: even what. Yeah. Even what the customer's asking for , right? Specifically if they were at, if your ceiling was 35 and they were saying, Can you just do 40?
[00:23:44] Kathy Sobus: Right. , you know, that could have changed the entire game for you.
[00:23:49] Dave Hoekstra: You know, and we're talking potential hundreds of thousands of dollars even in 1997 for this to work. . And so when we talk about the idea of brand guardians, this is what I love getting into this discussion, is because there's so much low hanging fruit out there, It is ridiculous. If you are listening to this and your organization does not use some form of analytics to understand what's happening out there, you are missing out on so much information to get your hands on. And that's what we're trying to do. Right?
[00:24:18] Kathy Sobus: Yeah. It's fun.
[00:24:19] Kathy Sobus: It's fun that you mention that. Right. couple of thoughts you just clicked off for me. One, I have a customer that we're running analytics with today and they were trying to figure out when their customers would defect. Like what? What was prompting them to leave or churn? And there's a phrase that came up that was called You guys.
[00:24:38] Kathy Sobus: You guys, when you guys, if you guys right. And so on, And this is
[00:24:44] Dave Hoekstra: not a New York enough, right? It's not a New York. Cause it would've been used, It would've been used
[00:24:49] Kathy Sobus: guys, You guys, Yeah. Right. Or if it was Philadelphia, it would've been these guys. Right? These guys. Yeah. So . No. No, not at all. But you know, just hearing a phrase like that and knowing and understanding you can train differently.
[00:25:02] Kathy Sobus: , you can empower differently. You can change the game here for your frontline sales people, frontline people, whether they're sales people or service people, and how that whole interaction happens and whether or not you have a happy employee and a happy customer too. The other thing was on one company I did work with, this was many years ago.
[00:25:22] Kathy Sobus: They had every employee do service observing and monitoring. , every employee in the entire organization, from the CEO on down, spent x amount of hours a month service observing. And evaluating now, to me that's incredible because there's definitely a sensitivity to what customers are saying then, and what agents are saying and it just brought it in to being more customer focused than they would've been had they not done that
[00:25:54] Dave Hoekstra: well.
[00:25:54] Dave Hoekstra: And service observing is a very powerful tool. And I think it's more powerful for the management as opposed to the content of what's being said because it's funny. The reason a lot of organizations have people service observe is so they can catch the things that they're missing, right?
[00:26:13] Dave Hoekstra: When somebody, let's say the the manager of the distribution center, when the manager of the distribution center listens to some calls, they're gonna catch some things and go, Whoa, that's not right at all. We need to fix this. Right? And you're like, Okay, great. We caught something that, that is good.
[00:26:26] Dave Hoekstra: If the marketing director listens to a few calls and goes, Wow, I did not know that. That's the approach that, that, that's what analytics is designed to do. It's designed to do beyond what that is. And so, I know we're supposed to be talking about brand guardians here, right? That's but this all, for those of you that are listening to this is what it all wraps around to, is imagine.
[00:26:48] Dave Hoekstra: The amazing experiences that your frontline workers can provide to your customers when they're empowered with the knowledge that can be delivered through these. Pretty amazing tools and yeah, you mentioned I like, I always like to go back. WFM has always been my life and passion. Right? We can go back to some of the amazing self-scheduling tools, the shift bidding tools, the the ability for, to match schedules along with work life balance and provide those things and not, and save you a little bit of money, by the way, but, . But these are all these things that when we talk about retaining employees, this is one of the key parts of the algorithm, right?
[00:27:26] Dave Hoekstra: We can talk about, you know, you gotta give them a good boss, you gotta give 'em a good schedule, you gotta pay them appropriately. You gotta be smart when it comes to benefits and those kind of things. But another huge key part of the algorithm is providing them with. The knowledge to do their job better.
[00:27:41] Dave Hoekstra: There's something yes, inherently rewarding about being really good at your job and really feeling I got this. This is what's amazing and that's what a lot of these tools can really point to.
[00:27:51] Kathy Sobus: Couldn't agree more.
[00:27:52] Dave Hoekstra: Great. Well, that's fantastic. So we kind of went on a little bit of a rant there, but That's okay.
[00:27:56] Dave Hoekstra: That's what this is all about, right? It's free form discussion, but this has been a lot of fun. I, what I want to do is kind of give you the podium here. Any last words of wisdom kind of regarding the idea of employee engagement or what we can potentially do? If you had a captive audience, which you do now what's something that you would say to them to really reinforce what we've talked about today?
[00:28:17] Kathy Sobus: Yeah, I would. I would first start off by saying, take this quiet, quitting notion. Seriously, and it's probably been out there for a long time, but it's been given a voice now. So people are saying to themselves, employees are saying, Well, okay. How many quiet quitters are around? I am I one of them or do I wanna be one of them?
[00:28:39] Kathy Sobus: Because I'm working really hard here yet my coworker is not working as hard as I am. And it's not a working hard thing. It's a working better. Conundrum that I think we're facing. So how do you do that when you're trying to protect your brand? That you wanna create a brand guardian in your contact center?
[00:28:59] Kathy Sobus: You want many brand guardians for everyone that. Comes into contact with a customer of yours. And so culturally, what can you do and what are the tools that you can use in order to help facilitate that? Right? And so if you think that you want to shift the culture a little bit and be one that's a little kinder and gentler, and not so much about what's my average handle time and did I meet my service level as opposed to, how's my employee doing today?
[00:29:28] Kathy Sobus: And are they engaged in their work and are they successfully fulfilling on those obligations on behalf of the company. That shifts things,
[00:29:36] Dave Hoekstra: right? It does. It does. That shifts. So if you were someone that maybe was a little worried about this and just getting started in your journey, what are some things that you might look at to gauge whether someone is quietly quitting or not?
[00:29:50] Dave Hoekstra: Any thoughts in
[00:29:50] that?
[00:29:51] Kathy Sobus: Yeah, definitely. First of all, I would advocate working with companies like ConvergeOne and Calabrio here to think about the solutions that are available to you that can help get you along a path, right? Tools are only gonna get you just so far, however, but start thinking of the tools that will make the agents' lives a little bit easier than they are today.
[00:30:13] Kathy Sobus: Self-service tools, knowledge-based tools. Workforce management, analytics you know, automated quality management, those tools are gonna help show you where you might need to improve or mar where you could improve and provide you a little bit of low hanging fruit, as we would call it, right?
[00:30:31] Kathy Sobus: In order to get along that path. But I would definitely think about taking the notion of quiet, quitting seriously, and see how that might help you.
[00:30:40] Dave Hoekstra: All right. Well that's fantastic and it's been so great discussing things. You know, how we can make sure the term brand guardians, I get overly geeky about it because it really does.
[00:30:51] Dave Hoekstra: It's what we do. It's what we do on a daily basis. What we do on a weekly basis is try to really empower these organizations to have this. And so hopefully for those of you out there who are. Maybe just starting your journey on looking at your employee engagement. We'd be happy to talk to you. Please check out the blog post on Calabrio.com
[00:31:08] Dave Hoekstra: it's titled, How to Create and Support Brain Guardians in Your Contact Center in conjunction with Kathy at ConvergeOne. And we are so excited and glad you were able to. Today, really do appreciate it. Just to make sure that everybody knows out there that Calabrio and ConvergeOne are willing and able to support any kind of questions you have.
[00:31:26] Dave Hoekstra: We love to talk about this stuff, so please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Kathy, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
[00:31:34] Kathy Sobus: It was great being with you today. Thanks for having me. Absolutely.
[00:31:37] Dave Hoekstra: And we will make sure to post all the appropriate links in the podcast. So that everybody can read and enjoy the blog post and make sure to visit ConvergeOne.
[00:31:46] Dave Hoekstra: But thanks again. For those of you that are listening, it always warms my heart to know you spent a little bit of time with us today. So from Calabrio and Working Smarter, my name's Dave Hoekstra. our guest today was Kathy Sobus from ConvergeOne. Thanks everybody. Have a great rest of your day, Great rest of your week, and we'll see you on the next episode of Working Smarter.
[00:32:03] Dave Hoekstra: Thanks everybody.