Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Stronger Contact Center Leadership: Cut Attrition, Boost Performance, Elevate EX = CX
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Hello everyone. Today we are chatting with Milan Batonich, the CEO and founder of Milan Motivates and co-host of the podcast, Build a Better BPO. Milan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Milan Batinich: Gina, thank you so much for having me. Anytime I have the opportunity to have a conversation with you and to see your smiling face, I am thrilled. I've been looking forward to this all week and I'm like, when do I get to hop on with Gina? Gina Gibson: Right. Oh, thank you so much. Milan, let's start with the basics. Tell us all a little bit about yourself. Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Milan Batinich: Yeah, so I've been in the contact center industry pretty much my whole life. So 20 plus years, a lot in the BPO industry came up, you know, like most people started as an agent and into operations management, moved into sales and, and yeah, you know, ⁓ I was growing up, I did not want to be a contact center person. Well, you know, nobody, I think says, you know, when they're in eighth grade, what do want to be when you grow up? I want to work in a contact center. ⁓ don't think I knew what that was back then. here I am, still in the space and I love it. I don't think I traded for anything. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Now I always like to ask somebody, tell us one thing that we won't find out about you on LinkedIn. And knowing you as close as I do, there's probably a million things you could tell us, but narrow it down to one for us. Milan Batinich: let's see. That's a great question. So I always post about my running and cycling. So that's on LinkedIn. I can't talk about that. So something personal over the last few years, I have gone through a ⁓ would say a massive faith deconstruction. I have deconstructed my faith and I don't think anyone on LinkedIn knows about that. So. Gina Gibson: Perfect, thank you. And I know you have a book coming out and I can't wait to read that as well. Excellent. inspired you, ⁓ create your consulting company? Milan Batinich: ⁓ I'm so happy. I'm gonna send you a copy. What? You're on the list. ⁓ great question again. So I would say really lies within my passion. So I remember years ago when I was promoted from being a contact center or back then call center agent to a supervisor role, the leader that I had at the time advised me, know, Milan, just make all of your agents a great agent like you were when you were an agent. I'm like, okay, great. So tactically, I'm like, prepared. I know the technical expertise. I know all of that information. I know how to make all of these agents great. but I did not know how to lead people all. I a terrible leader of other human beings. It was horrible, a horrible experience for them. I know for sure it was definitely a horrible experience for me. So over the years, you know, I went back to school for psychology and human behaviors and really wanted to focus on there's so such low employee engagement in a lot of industries, but especially contact centers. And, you know, if we all have this this life to enjoy the work that we're doing. We should be able to manage other people the way they want and need to be managed and we should be able to be managed the way we want and need to be managed as an employee. really it's been my my mission to help organizations teaching their leaders how manage human beings, how to lead human beings, how to treat other people. It's amazing to me how some know outside of work. how to treat people, but then once they walk through those office doors or log into Zoom or Slack or Teams, and then all of sudden they're a totally different person and don't know how to be kind to other humans. Gina Gibson: And I think part of that is growing up, right? Like you said, when you first became a supervisor, learning how to manage other people, it's not a, without training, it's not anything that people just innately have, I don't think. There are poor leaders, but those skills need to be honed. Milan Batinich: Right. ⁓ Yeah, exactly. I remember a specific time and an older employee on the floor came up to me and she's like, Milan, I just need to take, you know, a 15 minute break. I got to put my cat down after my shift today and I'm heartbroken. And didn't this to her, but my thought was, who cares? Like, why? How is that my problem? I get back on the phone. And luckily, I say that to her. That might have been the end of my career right then. But then looking back, I'm like, wow. So rigid, so terrible. Such a terrible leader. Gina Gibson: Yeah, not focused. So tell me what services do you guys, does Milan Motivates offer that does help be better leaders? Milan Batinich: Yeah, so I'm really excited. So I just ⁓ produced and finalized a ⁓ toolkit called the Frontline Manager Starter Kit made specifically for those team leads or those supervisors, those managers that might not have led people before, or maybe they are leading people, but they want more direction on how to lead people. And it's a six video series people can buy on my website or message me to purchase. And it's really focused on how to manage other people. So self-awareness, so. for those leaders understanding who they are, how they come across to their employees. And then how to treat their employees, how to manage their employees. We go into one-on-one coaching, how to handle underperformance, ⁓ to bridge the gap, because we know there's a gap between executive leadership and agents. So how can that ops manager bridge the gap between their agents ⁓ executive leadership and how to communicate both ways, how to have that communication flow. So really to help improve employee engagement, reduce employee turnover or attrition, and really build cohesive teams. So we do that through the video series. We do that through team building workshops and leadership strategic workshops. I do that through speaking engagements. then I also sell and service the Predictive Index, which is a behavioral and cognitive assessment tool that helps with all of that employee engagement and really how to treat other people. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And I know that you've seen a huge application for this in the BPO space and you're quite involved in the BPO space with your podcast. Why do think or why do BPO's in particular maybe need a different approach when it comes to leadership and develop? Milan Batinich: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with way BPO's are run is a of times there's so many different brands ⁓ that they So culturally it's harder for BPO's to identify who they are an organization. Where if you're a brand, I'll pick on one of my clients, ⁓ if you're General Mills, a brand. being General Mills, you build out a culture, you build out that brand, you have a way that you treat your employees. As a BPO that maybe services General Mills and many other brands, you're trying to be an extension of that company's culture. But sometimes a lot of that will get lost within own culture each employee identifies to a certain brand that they're representing. So I think it's difficult to really have your BPO stand out culturally. ⁓ versus kind of falling into, okay, we, you know, we adopt general Mills's culture. adopt American expresses culture. We adopt all these different companies cultures. And so how do we, how do we still have our culture to be able to have our, in our employees engaged ⁓ and, happy to come to work every day. cause I think a lot of times I've seen with BPOs, you have highly engaged employees on certain programs because they're being Gina Gibson: Ahem. Milan Batinich: managed and treated based on that brand's culture. Gina Gibson: Right. And then I think too, and even in your earlier kind of example that you gave with the cat, like your focus was probably on the metrics, right? And we know that there's a very strong focus on the metrics versus maybe like, you know, the metrics culture over people focused culture and leadership. So ⁓ do you help the organizations kind of balance the two where, ⁓ you have goals and metrics that you need to do, but your people are what's going to help you get. Milan Batinich: Yeah, I think there's an old adage that says, you know, if treat your employees well, then they'll treat your customers well. So I think that if if you prioritize ⁓ and know this is going to go against the grain and what a lot of people believe, but if you treat your employees well, you know, internally, if you manage them well based on how they need to be managed, I'm not saying like throw more gift cards at them or anything like that. But if you treat them the way they need to be treated, it's going to result in better KPIs. And I mean, I've seen that with clients where they treated their employees better and their KPIs rose ⁓ got a lot better because the employees were more engaged. They were happy to be at work. They were happy to help the customer on the phone or through chat or email. And so it resulted in better KPIs. So ⁓ definitely agree with balancing, but I think if more focus ⁓ put on the employee than is currently put on the employee. that will lead to better metric results. Gina Gibson: I agree entirely and you know, as we continue to do these podcasts and talk to different people in the industry, one of the common themes that's finally coming out, right? Like CX was all the buzz a few years ago and now we know it's AI, but I really see that everybody's coming together to realize that the employee experience, so EX equals CX, right? Just exactly what you're saying. And is such an important factor not to get lost. Milan Batinich: Right. Gina Gibson: ⁓ So if BPO leaders are listening today, what is one thing you think you could tell them that they could start doing today that would help their team that might be feeling burnt out or disconnected? What is just one tip you might want to give them? Milan Batinich: I'll do it in one word. Communicate. Communicate communication, whichever version you want to use. But communicate. I think a lot of leaders get tied up or the weeds or in the mud when it comes to, OK, how do I do a better job for my employees? Just communicate with them. Ask them what they want. Ask them what they need. Because, you know, I've had ⁓ leaders ask me, BPO leaders ask me, well, how ⁓ Is there a magic pill or is there a subscription I buy? What do I do to fix this? Is there software? Is there a tool? I mean, there are tools and all of that out there. But really, if you want to start today and do it quickly for zero cost, it's going to cost you 10 seconds to send out a message to your employees. can we be doing better? How can I be a better leader for you? Now, sometimes leaders don't want to hear the responses, but you want to be able to create an environment where employees feel comfortable responding and you will feel comfortable taking everything to heart and making changes. So really, one thing you can do today, communicate with your employees, find out what's going well, what can be going better, ⁓ go from there. Gina Gibson: And I think you nailed it on the head. What will you listen to and then actually put into action, right? Because getting the information and doing nothing is going to leave probably a greater dissatisfaction level than not asking. ⁓ Share with us the success story of ⁓ one of your customers, Milan. Milan Batinich: Right. Yeah, so my favorite, ⁓ I would say my favorite success story, it's a BPO based in Austin, Texas, Austin Metro. And went in there to help them. They were having 90 % annual attrition. Yeah, yeah, so what is that, like eight, almost seven and a half percent attrition per month. the problem was they were ⁓ inbound sales contact center. So people would call up, say, hey, I saw this product online or on TV, I wanna buy it. And CSRs would answer the call, process the order and move on to the next caller. The problem was their main KPI was to upsell and cross sell. Well, hey, if they're calling for, say, a necklace, upsell them the bracelet, the earrings, the ring, you know, all of the other pieces that we can sell to them. And they were 90 % attrition because they were really focused on managing people that were built for inbound customer service. They're managing them to sell. Gina Gibson: We can. Milan Batinich: So what we did was we identified, well, number one, as you hire new reps, you need to have that expectation that this isn't just processing orders. You need to set the expectation that they're going to be needing to sell so that way they know coming in because a lot of people are getting burnt out because they're like, no, I just want to process orders and move on. I don't want to ask those questions to people. And ⁓ so we identified ways to help them with their recruiting, their onboarding, their training. And we were able to. figure out ways to manage each employee that they had on staff appropriately to improve their engagement. you know, first year, they went from 90 % annual attrition to just under 15%. And we also found that during the nesting period, so from day one of training through about day 60, so training plus about a month, that 90 % of their 90 % annual attrition was happening in the first two months. And so we were able to lower that nesting period attrition down to 4 percent. So we're. Yeah, thanks. And we're able to make some waves. And that first year, they just about tripled their top line revenue because now everybody was asking for the cross sell and we're asking for the upsell. And the callers were like, oh, you're right. So those earrings would go great with this necklace. Let's let's go for it. So it wasn't a hard difficult sell. So they were able to triple their average order. Gina Gibson: Those are impressive numbers. Yeah. Milan Batinich: each call. Gina Gibson: That's incredible. Tell us with the trends that you're seeing in the market today, what do you think is gonna be, mean, we all know with AI and what's the impact on BPO's or just on employees in general, what are you seeing in the market and how do you, what are you excited about when you see what's happening out there? Milan Batinich: Yeah. So along the vein of AI, I'm really excited to see how BPO's and how contact centers are going to upskill their human employees. So I'm really excited to ⁓ see the opportunities that are going to come from AI for say tier one inbound agents to be able to move up and learn other skills and be able to be the individuals who are training the AI within their contact center. So I'm really looking forward to better opportunities for lot of the contact center agents. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And to wrap things up, Milan, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do three little rapid fire questions. So what is your favorite word? Milan Batinich: I'm ready. Favorite word? I know it's rapid fire. My favorite word is discipline. Gina Gibson: What is your least favorite word? Milan Batinich: Oof. Can't. Cannot. Gina Gibson: and what excites you the most. Milan Batinich: What excites me the most is being able to do what I love. Having joy and energy, doing my work with passion, peace and purpose and helping other people to be able to do that as well. Gina Gibson: I love it. If Milan, if somebody wants to know more information on your services, who should they reach out to? Milan Batinich: Yeah. So Milan at Milan motivates that come. They can go to Milan motivates that come find me on LinkedIn. I'm everywhere on LinkedIn. So they can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, YouTube. My phone number is out there. Text me, call me, whatever you want to do. Gina Gibson: Perfect. A big thank you to Milan for joining us today and for sharing their insights. It's always great to talk to people focusing on the true superstars in our industry, which are the employees. So Milan, thank you so much for your time. Milan Batinich: Thank you for having me, Gina.