Contact Centers have become experts at engaging with customers via multiple channels. How many of these same companies are leveraging these same channels to actively engage and retain their employees? Bryan Couch, an Analyst with A Marketing Resourse writes about a simple process you might be able to use to better engage with your own staff using tools easily available and at your disposal.

Multi-Channel. This buzzword has been swirling around the contact center industry for a couple of years now. Its buzzworthiness is not unfounded, as the ways which customers interact with businesses has grown from phone and snail mail to phone, snail mail, email, web chat, twitter, facebook, SMS, mobile apps, and on and on. Each passing month seems to bring about another channel of communication!

We spend so much time focusing on how to meet the customer’s needs via these burgeoning avenues of interaction, we may have overlooked another crucial aspect of our multi-channel existence-communicating with our own employees. Today’s contact center employees are more tech-savvy than ever, and are getting younger and younger all the time. We know these millenials are a terrific asset to have because they understand and utilize these channels in their personal lives, so naturally they can easily interact with customers on these channels as well.

Why not leverage their use of these channels in their lives as a means to gain greater employee engagement? According to a recent survey, 88% of millenials have a facebook account and 59% of millenials have a twitter account. My question is this - What percentage of companies are actively engaging their employees via facebook and twitter? Not many.

The fact is, employees stay with a company because of relationships. For those of the millennial generation, relationships are most fruitfully cultivated via social media. By setting up a company facebook and twitter account that is employee centric, you can develop a means of meeting your employees on their level. Pictures of new hires, employee of the month, company potlucks, birthday shoutouts, etc. This is a free and powerful means to build a meaningful rapport between your company and your employees.

This multi-channel interaction can extend beyond just social media as well. Why not a happy birthday text message? Why not an email to their personal email account congratulating them on achieving their monthly sales goal? There are so many creative and exciting ways to engage our employees these days. We all would be wise to use them as a means of gaining greater employee retention and engagement.