Case Study - Listening To Employee Needs
Mike Faith started Headsets.com 10 years ago, and the retailer has quickly grown to become one of the major players in the nearly $2 billion U.S headsets industry. A large portion of the staff of the San Francisco, CA-based business comprises a customer service call center that processes headset orders.
Call centers, it should be noted, have a reputation for high turnover. And, unfortunately, the reputation is not unfounded. A new study by Cornell University finds that U.S. call center turnover rates range from 25 to 50 percent. That means a lot of people coming through the door to take the seat of outgoing call center employees.
At Headsets.com, that revolving door has a jam in it. Mike Faith, the president, CEO and founder of the company, instituted a system where prospective candidates – for the call center, shipping department or any area – are interviewed at least seven or eight times before they’re hired. What’s more, some of these interviews are with the company’s voice coach and psychologist.
“Each employee is really a key hire for us,” Faith says. He isn’t kidding. Many employees have started their tenure with the company in the call center and explored growth opportunities that have arisen as the business has grown. Two such employees are Rick Mills, who was a customer service phone rep in 2002 and is now CFO, and Courtney Wight, who also started as a phone rep a year and a half ago and is now customer service manager.
“The interview process is long – I remember when I went through it – but then once you work here you can see that everyone wants to work here and everyone likes it here,” Wight says.
Connecting the interviews to the current culture, for those employees Headsets.com brings on, is the previously mentioned voice coach involved in the interview process, Ken Welsh. Hailing from Australia, Welsh handles coaching and team building for some big name clients in addition to Headsets.com, including BMW, Coca-Cola and IBM. Wight says her staff is reinvigorated whenever Welsh shows up, and that has led to improved morale, service and, consequently, sales.
Welsh is one of four global business coaches to which all Headsets.com employees have access. Besides the voice coach and the psychologist, who’s based in San Diego, there’s a management and organization consultant from the U.K. and a U.S.-based NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) practitioner.
“There’s a huge payoff with the coaches,” says Mills, who has used a few of them himself. “Sometimes it’s tough to go to your supervisor with issues you’re having – you don’t know how it affects their impression of you as an employee. But if you have this outside person who’s trained to help you, it goes a long way toward feeling like you have an open avenue not only to advance, but to work through challenges at work and ways to improve.”
Of course, when the coaches aren’t around, the leadership continues to work to identify opportunities to help employees succeed in their roles and to grow. Faith says that new employees who have been with the organization for 90 days receive a $600 “training allowance”; after a year the amount increases to $1500 (the same amount is awarded annually thereafter). The allowance can be applied to work-related or personal growth pursuits. “They can even spend it on something connected to their next job, if they decide they don’t want to work here,” Faith says.
Helping this focus is the fact that Headsets.com’s leadership tries to take the inverse approach to one of Corporate America’s major worker gripes: managers who love to look for things done wrong and exploit these acts.
“We try to catch somebody doing something right, instead of doing something wrong.” Says Tiffany Rawson, who started with the company about two and a half years ago as a shipper and is now manager of the shipping department. “If someone is doing something wrong, I’ll point it out, but I try to balance it by making sure I still find those things that they’re doing right – the kinds of things that tend to go unnoticed day to day.”
This kind of active, positively focused management has not gone unnoticed by the company’s employees. They respond in kind not only by working harder, but by pitching their ideas, in which Faith readily places stock to help grow the business. Wight made note of two internal e-mail addresses where she encourages her staff to send ideas about anything having to do with the company. “They could be large or small, and they go right to Mike,” she says. Many of the ideas are acted upon, and employees are rewarded financially for their extra contribution.
As with many businesses, especially smaller enterprises, at Headsets.com their product is their passion. One need look no further for evidence of this than the Staff Recommendations page on their website, where many of the customer service reps have posted short descriptions of their headset of choice and why they love it. It’s clear by seeing their pictures, showing them in their favorite headset, that they’re some of the people keeping the revolving call center door from swinging on needlessly.
______________________________________________
Winning Workplaces’ goal is to provide small and midsize employers with proven, practical, and affordable people practices. Too often, the information and resources needed to create a high-performance workplace are out of reach for all but the largest organizations. Winning Workplaces is changing that by offering employers affordable consulting, training and information. We help employers assess needs and develop strategies to improve their workplace practices.
For more information, please contact us at: http://www.winningworkplaces.org
Tags: call center, customer service, employee, employer, headset, listening, needs, recruitment, retail, training
