CSR Meetings that can Motivate and Elevate | CSR / Dispatcher Lunch & Learn Sessions

All right, so today's topic is CSR meetings that can motivate and elevate your team. The reason that this topic is so near and dear to me is because I ran a call center right at the start of COVID is when it was handed over to me right after they had sent all of my CSRs to work from home. And I realized that having inefficient meetings was my first downfall. A lot of my CSRs would think like, why are we in here? We're not learning anything. We're not doing anything. They were fighting with each other. They were bickering. And I realized that this meeting was something that was really going to unite them. And it did. And once we got our structure down, I just saw all of our numbers just skyrocket. It really, really changed the game for us. So I'm really excited to share my. My meeting structure with you today. Be prepared to take notes. But also, don't worry, we're recording this little stick tidbit here. One question that I have gotten before is, how am I supposed to have a CSR meeting when they're supposed to be answering the phones? Great question. So obviously, there's the answering service route you can take. If you have one on standby, they can be available for the duration of that meeting, or we can make sure that another department is trained on the phones. So in my shop Specifically, we had CSRs and dispatch separate, so. So our CSRs would cover for dispatchers during their meeting and vice versa. Also, one of the main things we're going to talk about today is having an efficient meeting. So having an efficient meeting that you've planned through and you're prepared for will ensure you're going to get back to those phones in no time. But also remember, not meeting consistently will do more harm than good. It's really easy to make an excuse to not have the meeting by saying, oh, the phones are just too busy. Remember that this is the place for your team to come to get to know each other and to learn tips and tricks for making their job easier. So if you can prioritize having these meetings with your team. All right, so why is meeting structure important? The actual structure of it. One engagement. We want to specifically lay out time for our CSRs to have their voices heard and to give each other shout outs. Accountability. We want to make sure that our CSRs are being held accountable to their roles. We're giving them all of the tools that they have to be successful. Um, also, structure is important because of consistency. Consistency fosters trust. And if your CSRs know what to expect in that meeting, they're, they're going to trust you more. They're going to know exactly what to expect. They, they know they're going to be held accountable to certain things. And you're also going to see a big shift in their morale too because they're able to actually chat with each other, get to know each other and just exceed succeed in their roles. And then also I already mentioned this, but efficiency. We want to make sure that our meetings are not just those long, boring, annoying meetings that could have been an email or a memo. We want to make them nice and efficient. All right, so this is my sample team meeting structure and I'm going to break down each of these with some ideas. But right out the gate, shout outs, something that's going to start your meeting out on a positive note. Your CSRs are going to feel the energy in the room go up and they're not going to be in there like, oh God, here we go, another boring meeting that I have to be in. Unfortunately we do have to go over the boring stuff too. So there is a section for announcements and different types of training. And then always ended on a positive note too. My team in particular, we would do chants. We were a little crazy. I always think of like a cheer squad when I think back to my old CSR team. So number one, your shout out section. It might seem a little odd, but you actually want to plan these in advance. You don't want to forget good shout outs. You also don't want to be up there. Like I can't think of one because if you don't have any shout outs to share, it's going to be very awkward for you and for your team. This is a great time to share the love. Encourage your team to participate. You shouldn't be the only one giving shout outs. It got to a point where I would encourage them all to bring at least one and they loved it so much. I would see them writing shout outs on post it notes and leaving them on their desk so that by the time we got to the meeting they had several to share. And sometimes it was 10 minutes worth of shout outs which imagine how much love is in that. 10 minutes of shout outs and your team is just feeling so good about what they're doing. It really does change the game for your team. So always start on a positive note and then the boring stuff. So we have announcements, some things you don't want to forget, Team reminders, talk about anybody that's about to go out of office. Are there any schedule days or schedule changes? Are there any challenges that your CSRs are working on? And when I say challenges, I mean are you doing a month of bingo? Are you doing who can book the most calls in the next week? Remind them what that contest is and chat about it. Don't forget your company reminders too. So if there's any big policies that got rolled out, any upcoming events, maybe, maybe your organization does charitable giving and they need to bring in something. But don't forget those company reminders too. And then last but not least, very important, marketing campaigns. Your CSRs should always know what marketing campaigns are currently going on in your organization. Why? Because they're going to get a phone call that says, hey, can you tell me more about this ad that I just saw on the back of the grocery cart? What is your CSR going to say? Hopefully not. I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you tell me what it said? So make sure maybe they have a binder somewhere that they can all access or maybe it's a Google Drive they can look at. But make sure they know every campaign you have going on. Any talking points that they need to speak to and this is a great time to call those out. Awesome. And if anything comes in the chat, ang can you let me know because I can't see it right now.

Thank you.

Awesome. And then we also have training on processes. So processes being maybe software training. If you're using Service Titan, you know that we do quarterly releases. Maybe something looks a little bit different to your CSRs or maybe there's a new feature that you want them to start using. This is a great time to do that. There's also technical training. Maybe they have new phones, maybe there's a new clock in device in the office. Just think of anything that is more of a step by step how to process and not so much the communication piece of their job. One thing you also want to keep in mind, your team all has a different, they all have different learning styles. So we want to make sure that we are helping each of them learn in the best way possible. So maybe in this meeting we're specifically showing the how so that they can see it. Maybe you're actually showing a video of you doing it. Loom is a great tool for that. But also make sure you bring an SOP with you. Or maybe it's just the service site knowledge base article so that if there's somebody who likes to read, you can share that with them too. But that way it's not a. Oh yeah, you talked about it in the meeting. I still didn't understand it though. They, you have several different ways that they can go back and process that information afterwards. We also, probably the most important thing for our csrs is training on communication. This is something you want to do every single time you meet. Because you might see one objection is really high this week and the next week it flip flops to a different objection. We want to make sure that we are making them comfortable doing objection busting, as I'm going to call it. They're always going to get that. No. And we just want to make sure that they're equipped to handle it. So one, analyze your top unbooked call reasons. There's a report for this if you're using Service Titan and you can see okay, in the last week, the most common one was I want a price over the phone. So create a handout for your team that has objection busters on it for that specific objection. They can hang it up if they want. Maybe it's like a big flashcard for them that they're going to memorize. But have those ready to go so that they can refer back to them when they're struggling and then also bring call recordings. So try to support that same unbooked call reason that you're going over. And they don't have to be bad, they can be good ones. Maybe you found one where a CSR had that objection and they overcame it. We want to share that or maybe we have one where they weren't able to overcome it and we want to talk about how we could have handled it better. So another piece of this. I know CSRs don't like hearing themselves talk, but the more you do it, the more they're going to get used to it and it's not going to be as painful. So try as much as you can do. Maybe at least one a week. They'll start to get more comfortable with it and then also allow them to give some constructive criticism. So I'm going to call out Angie's seven star CSR program. She does something called Hearts and Wishes. So as your CSRs are listening to this recording, they're able to share the hearts, which is I love that you did this. And then they're able to share the wishes. I wish you could have done it this way instead. That way it's still positive. Hearts and wishes are both good things, but we're, we're talking about what was good and could have been a little bit Better. And then also role playing. Allow them to practice in real time. You can be the customer. Maybe you can have them role playing with each other. You can break them up into groups to do it or have them go in front of the group to do it. They're going to be shy about this. It is awkward, but make it fun. I had a CSR Hector that was so animated and he always would make us laugh. Like encourage that. Encourage it to be a funny. Call somebody that's really sassy or talking about all the babies they have in the background. But just encourage them to, to have fun with it. And make sure you have some prizes because it is awkward. We all know it. And give them some little incentive to participate in these. All right. And don't forget to make room for fun meetings. Again, they don't have to be boring. You can use team chants. We loved Chance. My CSRs were absolutely nuts. We would try to be as loud as possible and our goal was to get in trouble. We did a couple of times, but it just really brought the energy up in the room. We always did one at the beginning of the meeting and at the end. You can also bring games. You can do meeting bingo. How many times is Britney going to say objection that that kind of stuff. Scavenger hunts. If you've ever seen the game show minute to win it. Those games are literally a minute. Steal one of them and do one with your csrs. Trivia games. Just get creative with this. Make sure that they're having fun and they're able to connect with each other. Not just in a business sense. You can also have theme days if you think your CSRS would be into it. Crazy sock day, Football jersey day. Crazy hair day. Get, get, get fun with it. But also make sure that day coincides with your meeting so that you can actually show them off and have fun with it. All right. And this kind of ties into the fun piece. But shake things up. You can also consider allowing your CSRs to take part in leading that meeting. Part of it or all of it? Especially if your call center is getting big enough that you think they might start to report into each other. If you have lead CSRs or senior CSRs, this is a great small way to start giving them some leadership training. Help them to be comfortable speaking in front of a group. And it just shakes things up. Even if you have someone, okay, Patti, you're going to lead the shout outs today or you're going to lead the chant today. It's something little, but it just, it just makes Them feel important and special and like they're, they're helping the bus keep moving. Also, if you do have your CSR and dispatch team split, try a joint meeting every once in a while. Just remember these two teams have opposing goals. Sometimes the csrs want that board to get full. And on a really busy day, the dispatchers are really stressed trying to get that board to run. So when it keeps piling up, they do start to kind of get at each other's throats a little bit. So try a joint meeting every so often to unite them. It can just be a fun one too. Maybe it's some kind of competitive tournament type thing. That one definitely have an answering service at bay though. And also, if you don't have much to discuss, try your best not to cancel it anyway. If you can, just replace it with a scavenger hunt or something. Highly recommend that if you cancel your meetings, it is going to start showing your CSRs, even if they don't realize it, that that meeting might not actually be that important. And we don't want them to have that thought. We want them to know, no, this is valuable, this is good for me and it's going to help me get better at my job. All right, so if you're ready to start planning, one thing I highly recommend, Angie's going to love this because I know Angie and I both have a zillion planners, but have a meeting planner specifically. You can get one of these on Amazon for $10 or less. And it all it is is literally just a meeting. Like, here's, here's your action items, here's what you're going to talk about, trainings, what date is it happening on? Do you want to take attendance? But what I used to do is I'd get that planner. I would put all of my meeting dates on each page. And then I was able to proactively go through and plan out my meetings in real time. So by the time we got to the meeting, I already had the agenda because I remembered, oh, okay, I need to add this marketing campaign. Oh, so and so did this really well, I'm going to shout her out. Let me write that down. But that way you're not forgetting anything. Everything's going to be talked about. And you're also able to be super proactive, especially as you start learning about marketing campaigns. For example, you know, one's coming up in November. You don't necessarily want to introduce it yet, but let's flip forward to the end of October and write it in there. So we don't forget about it. And then also make sure that it's a planned cadence. I recommend once per week for 30 minutes to an hour. An hour might be a little long for some, but again, if you need to have that shorter meeting, this is where efficiency is going to be huge. You're able to get more things in when you have that structure down. And again, don't skip meetings if you can help it. All right, I think I've done a lot of word vomiting. Is there any questions for me? Any reactions? Oh, Vicki, Okay. I said this in the beginning. I think you may have come in late, though, so it's okay. No worries. Answering service or if you have your CSRs and dispatchers split, they can learn to cover the phones for each other.

And sometimes we would just have one CSR be dedicated to answering phones and they would miss the meeting, but we would catch them up afterwards. Like if, if all else fails, keep somebody on the phones and try to do it at a time when your phones aren't that busy. So we've seen the highest call volume is between 9 and 12. So don't do your CSR meetings. At our company, we just did ours this morning. We did it at 7am so before we even turn the phones back on from our after hours, we do it that first hour. It kind of brings everybody together. Then by 8am everyone's on the phones and ready to go.

I love that once a week it's.

Not, you know, I know 7:00am and we have a few CSRs that don't come in until later in the day. So we always bring them in by Zoom. If they're not. If their shift doesn't start at.

At 8 o', clock, they.

We have them joined by Zoom.

So there you go. I also love Joe's idea. He said we usually split our staff in two different meetings so nobody misses out. I love that so much. Joe, do you split them up in the same group each time or do you shuffle them so that they can still get to chat with different people each time? And you're welcome to come off mute, by the way, if you're comfortable.

Yeah, this might be easier to talk.

Out than to type.

So we usually leave it consistent just because our staff sits so close to one another. They, you know, they already know each other pretty well. But just for a consistent schedule, we usually leave it the same.

That's a great idea. I love that one. Thank you so much for sharing that. Ashley asked, do you have recommendations on some of your most impactful fun team Building or icebreaker activities. So my team was really competitive, so we loved doing trivia and we. I would actually do that if we had like a new process. I would do a trivia game based on the process to check their learning on it. And the winner got a prize. I think my favorite will always be scavenger hunts, though, Just throughout the office. I told them they had to be quiet, though. No running and disrupting others. But, um, that one always got the most laughs, I think. And gosh, what was the other one? Those are some of my big ones. I like to hear from the group though, because I know I don't have all the ideas. What are some of yalls favorite icebreakers?

We have some. I was just trying to type, but I can talk faster than I can type because I'm multitasking. But one of my favorite ones, especially when we get a new person, is we just put in this pot and we put random facts about ourselves and then we draw them out and try to guess who it is. Or like some people call it two truths and a lie. Something like that. We usually pay just so we get to know each other a little bit better. That's one of my favorite ones. And then we have a kind of educational. We'll go like number one through five and you draw the number and then we do a little bit of role playing. Like say if you get the number five, we do a call. We might use a call from call coaching. And so I know I have the number five, and so I try, like on the call coaching. I have to get five no's before I say yes, if that makes sense. So it's kind of a fun thing. Like we're acting like a customer and it's just like a rebuttal thing. Usually price questions, because that's our biggest. Our biggest one around here is nobody want to pay a dispatch fee.

Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that, Angie. Do you have any fun ones? I'm sure you do.

So we haven't done this one for a while. I'm just thinking back to some of the ones we've done previously. But bingo, like you said on air, is. Is really fun. And we've even done bingo where we add the filled employees with the csrs that I, you know, so just thinking about, like, overall bingo. And we do this kind of during our slower months. Like for us, August is a bit of a slower month where the heating is kind of stopping and. Or the cooling is stopping, but no one needs heating yet. So that the Call volume starts to dwindle a bit. And so, you know, like, I sold a membership or I. If it's something we've been working on in our training, like using. Thank you a couple times, using their name twice on a call. Some of those things that you train specifically on. Because when they're looking at their bingo card, you know, it's. It's putting things together that you've trained on on a bingo card. So they're intentionally thinking about it during the day as they're answering calls. And then we just do prizes during the meeting. But so thinking about how to implement in a meeting is a new way for me and I like that idea.

I think it's fun. Ashley just said we do append the name on the technician to make sure we know all the text names so much.

I love that.

That is so fun.

It's amazing.

One thing that I remember, I think I learned this from you actually, Brittany, when you were running your call center. Ways to keep people engaged, even in some of those slower times. I know. I think you did one at Christmas time where you had like a Christmas tree and you had gifts wrapped up under the tree. Do you want to share a little bit about that one? Because I thought that was a really fun, engaging way to keep your CSRS engaged throughout the day.

Yes. So I actually did. That was a Christmas in July. We had a little. I brought in like a white Christmas tree. Our theme of the year was Star wars. So it had a bunch of Star wars ornaments on it, wrapped a bunch of random presents. My CSRs love office supplies, like pretty ones. So a bunch of those gift cards. And every week we would have a goal and so say it was to book a certain amount of AC tune ups. Every time they would get an AC tune up, they'd get a lottery ticket and they could try and get as many as they could at the end of the week, or I think it was during the meeting actually that we would do it. I'd pull a lottery ticket. Whoever got drawn would go get to unwrap a present. And we did that for a whole month. So that. That was fun. That's not. Not so much an icebreaker, but it was definitely fun team building for them. And again, they were so competitive with each other. I think I also should probably. I don't know if I've already shared this in this meeting before, but one of the most fun team building challenges, I'm going to call it team building. It was a competition, though. Whoever booked the most heat tune ups, it within like a two week span, got to dump ice water on my head. And that was the funniest thing ever because even though they didn't all get to dump the bucket, they still all got to watch it. They were just giggling and laughing and that was. That was definitely a memorable day. Memorable day for me.

I'd love to hear about other competitions you guys have done and celebrated with your. With your team. Does anybody want to share some of those competitions?

Ashley, you came off mute. Do you have one to share?

I was just going to say I appreciate the suggestions. We do team building activity in every meeting. So I'm a huge fan of doing that. I think it's super fun, but I feel like I've been doing it for so many years. Like, I'm running out of ideas. But I think one of my favorite ones, we did a like, escape room. But it would be like you have to figure out a puzzle of like, something. Like there was like actual really small puzzles that were like eight pieces. And then you had to, you know, find what was wrong with like a certain job that was booked incorrectly. You had to figure out what was wrong with it before you can move on to the next station. And I think that was a really fun one. It, you know, took us like 20 minutes maybe in the meeting.

That sounds so cool. I love that one.

We do one that I found this when I took over the call center behind. I found this big, huge ninja trophy and I already had call center ninja on it. So I thought of a creative way to every month if I have a different goal for the month and whoever wins it wins the call center Ninja. If they keep it for the second month, the prize grows each month that they keep it. So we'll start over as something small. And then if the same person wins it, the prize keeps growing so they get really competitive on they want to steal it from that person and try to keep it. So that's been a fun one to keep them engaged.

That's awesome. Y' all are so creative. Some days I wish I was still a call center manager just so I could steal some of yalls ideas. I love it. Are there any other questions about anything I covered today or any other ideas we want to share? Oh, Desiree, she put. We do role play every morning for 15 minutes, even with the field technicians. As far as competition, we did one for the Olympics for two weeks. We played different games that you'd find with the Olympics. Like the balance beam. We used a wood plank and handed out medals at the end of the week. I love that so much. But, yes, you're right. You also should be role playing with your technicians, too. A lot of these tips can work with other teams too, but definitely role play with those technicians again. It's going to be awkward for them at first, but they get used to it and then they start to see their numbers increase and their paychecks increase and they stop complaining about it.

And I love that Desiree does this every single morning. It's not just once a week at a team meeting, but she's making an effort every morning. And, yeah, they're going to get a lot more comfortable with it. If you're doing it every single day, it just starts to feel routine instead of uncomfortable. That's awesome.

Congrats. Definitely. All right, do we want to jump into masterminds, Ange?

Yes, for sure. Thank you so much, Brittany, for that awesome conversation for all these ideas for team meetings. I'm excited to see how they everyone's team meetings elevate. I hope you'll share in Masterminds or in our. You know it. Send. Send us a note. We'd love to hear how. How these things are working for you as you implement them. So I'm going to stop the recording now and we'll move to our Mastermind section where you can bring your questions.