Agent Rewards
Commonly, customer support agents have a pretty thankless job. Often, their experiences with feedback are centered around customers who feel negatively, as customers don't typically have an outlet for rewarding agents who provided them with a stellar experience.
A customer-driven rewards system helps to motivate agents to always bring their A-game, providing positive reinforcement to aid in building habits and skills that result in awesome support experiences for your customers. Motivated agents are typically happier, more engaged with their work, experience burnout less often, and agent attrition rates are decreased as a result.
At Stella Connect, we love support agents, so we built a rewards system that allows you to choose which rewards are available to agents and allows customers to recommend rewards when agents deserve them.
Building Your Agent Rewards Program
There are a few considerations you should keep in mind when building a rewards program for your team.
What type of rewards do you want customers to be able to recommend for your agents? Think about rewards that fit your brand and are aligned with your company culture.
What is your team's budget for rewards? Of course, we'd all love to provide agents with amazing rewards more often, but it's important to think about how fulfilling earned rewards will work for your team. A higher budget will allow you to provide product-based rewards (like a gift card or movie tickets), or experience-based rewards (like a spa day or an extra PTO day), while a lower budget doesn't mean you can't provide rewards at all! Recognition-based rewards like a company-wide Slack kudos or a shoutout in the monthly all-hands meeting are best for those teams with a lower rewards budget.
How many votes will an agent need to receive in order to have earned a reward? We allow three reward options - a low, mid, and high tier reward. Typically, a reward threshold is chosen and agreed upon while implementing rewards.
How many stars does an agent need to receive before the option for a customer to recommend a reward appears? You can choose either 4 or 5 stars as the trigger for a reward vote. While a 4-star interaction may still be fantastic, choosing 5 stars provides a very clear performance goal. Choose the option that works best for your team!
To customize your Rewards program, click the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of Stella Connect and click on the Rewards/Areas of Excellence tile. You'll need to select Rewards from the dropdown at the top of the page in order to begin customizing. Currently, you can only use one of either Rewards or Areas of Excellence, not both.
We'll provide a small, medium, and large reward default. If you'd like to customize the rewards options you'll allow customers to choose from, please reach out to your account's CSM.
Please note that if you begin using rewards without setting a rewards threshold (the number of votes an agent needs to receive in order to have earned a reward fulfillment) and you choose to enable thresholds at a later date, all rewards progress will be cleared when thresholds are enabled so that agents start fresh.
Monitoring Progress and Fulfilling Rewards
Once you've built and implemented your rewards program, you'll be able to monitor rewards progress by clicking on the Rewards Reports menu item in the navbar. We provide a few tools for monitoring progress and fulfilling rewards so that you can use the one that works best for your team.
Your agents can monitor their own progress from the top of their stream. They will be able to see the 3 rewards and their progress towards the threshold set above.
