A contact centre for a millennial workplace

Unsurprisingly, this traditional environment is less appealing to the millennial workforce.

As a business, this leaves us with two options:

1. Assume we can change their perception of the workplace (which is unlikely, over the long-term);

2. Choose instead to adapt our workplace to meet the needs of the emerging millennial workforce.

For our MLC Life Insurance Operations teams, we’ve started to redesign the workplace and work to best respond to both customer and employee needs. We saw an opportunity to break away from traditional operating silos. Our workplace model now provides for our staff to continue to focus on handling inbound customer demands, while also enabling them to work on other projects and customer work.

A recent example of this is our decision to pilot cross-skilling between the Contact Centre and Administration teams. It has enabled us to create a more flexible workforce as we have multiple employees who can pivot to immediate customer demand as required. By multiskilling the workforce it’s enabled people to feel more fulfilled within their role as it add diversity to their work and significantly increases their skills and capabilities. It has also allowed us to start planning for the future skills required in a modern contact centre.

The growth of millennials in Contact Centres shows no sign of slowing down. Those businesses that best get to grips with the change, and adapt their operational models to reflect it, are more likely to retain employee talent and have higher levels of engagement, which in turn will deliver strong customer outcomes.