Turnover a New Leaf. Reduce Attrition & Improve Agent Engagement

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1 1 Turnover a New Leaf Reduce Attrition & Improve Agent Engagement The call center agent s job isn t an easy one. Most of the day is spent interacting with customers and keeping them satisfied. When time permits agents may be asked to complete training and coaching activities that enable them to do their job well. But finding the time to train, coach and even communicate with agents remains a challenge for many centers. And as transaction types become more complex, the agent learning curve has become even steeper. Many agents become frustrated with the endless grind, lack of variety and end up walking out the door not long after they get their first few paychecks. And every time an agent leaves, it means big bucks for your company. Industry-wide, agent attrition is high, hovering around 30%. Not only is this expensive in terms of hard costs like recruiting, hiring, new hire training and productivity losses, there are even more critical hidden opportunity costs such as customer churn that many organizations don t track because they are harder to quantify. The truth is that when agents don t have the training and coaching they need, their performance suffers. And poor performing agents are less satisfied with their jobs and ultimately more likely to leave your company. Similarly, when customers have a poor call center experience, they are also more likely to leave your company. (Research shows that customers who do not have their issue resolved are eight times more likely to defect.) When poor performing agents leave, they are replaced by new agents who are unprepared. This leads to more poor performance, thus repeating the cycle and increasing the risk to customer loyalty. So how can you reduce attrition in your call center and stop the madness? High turnover rates in employee groups having less than six months of experience may signal a lack of sufficient training to handle calls. We turned to our Productivity Plus panelists Greg Levin of Off Center and Vicki Herrell from the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) to better understand turnover and agent disengagement.

2 Turnover a New Leaf 2 In Don t forget to investigate attrition in your center, Herrell provides insights into the importance of measuring attrition and separating good from bad attrition. Levin s take on the issue offers call center leaders points to consider about agent engagement and the warning signs to address before agents walk out your door and contribute to your attrition numbers. Don t forget to investigate attrition in your center Attrition is a crucial measurement to managers interested in keeping costs down and customer satisfaction high. Customer satisfaction suffers when a steady stream of inexperienced CSRs handle calls, and the cost of replacing an agent can approach 150 percent of the employee s annual salary. Other costs associated with attrition take the form of call escalations, repeat calls, and, potentially, customer attrition. Employee morale can be difficult to quantify but attrition can be used as a good indicator. Poor morale has consequences for customer service levels, productivity, and overall performance. It can also lead to higher attrition rates. Attrition measurements depend on the contact center s location, industry, and objectives. In order to measure attrition so that a contact center can properly plan replacements for those who leave and identify the cause of controllable attrition, the following should be considered: State the percentage of the workforce that has left in the last month and last year Separate monthly and yearly percentages by: Work group Reason (terminations, resignations, promotions, etc.) Length of service (mostly under 1 year? 6 months?) Part-time and full-time It is important to separate good and bad attrition when doing your analysis. Examples of good attrition would be promotions or transfers. The call center is often the stepping stone to other careers in the company. Although you still have to deal with the loss of resource from this type of attrition, the causes are significantly different from bad attrition. Reasons employees leave the company need to be investigated closely to gain insight into the underlying causes. High turnover rates in employee groups having less than six months of experience may signal a lack of sufficient training to handle calls. High rates within a particular work group would also serve as a flag for further investigation as to potential causes. The bottom line is that people leave for a reason. There are many reasons, to be sure, but understanding the differences between the reasons you can address and those that are external to your operation can result in significant cost savings.

3 Turnover a New Leaf 3 Don t forget to investigate attrition in your center was authored by Vicki Herrell and was originally published at blog. intradiem.com. Six Reasons Your Contact Center Agents Are Disengaged great job. If you are not one of those centers, one or more of the issues below could be what is holding you and your agents down: Your center s key performance metrics destroy the passion that agents originally You walked into your contact center this morning to find 10% of your agents absent, another 10% of them out of adherence and most of the remaining front-line staff swearing under their breath, sobbing in their seat or slamming their head against their monitors or all of the above. You look around and wonder, Where did we go wrong? Unfortunately, you are not alone. High agent burnout and rampant turnover perennially plague the majority of contact centers. Many managers feel that their hands are tied. They believe that high disengagement and attrition are simply woven into the contact center fabric, and that there s little they can do about it. They are WRONG. If that were the case, then ALL contact centers would struggle to keep agents in place and inspired. But that s just not so. I ve had the pleasure of working with a number of centers where agents like coming to work and want to do a good job, as well as center where agents love coming to work and are committed to doing a brought to the job. They believe that high disengagement and attrition are simply woven into the contact center fabric, and that there s little they can do about it. They are WRONG. Your agents bought into the customer- centric culture you sold them during recruiting and came on board excited to serve, but then the center slammed them over the head with rigid Average Handle Time (AHT) objectives and Calls per Hour quotas their first day on the phones. You might want to start emphasizing metrics like Contact Quality, Customer Satisfaction and First- Call Resolution before both your agents and your customers defect. Do so, and you ll be surprised how things like AHT and number of calls handled fall in line. Your quality monitoring program emphasizes the monitoring much more than the quality. Your supervisors and/or QA team are too focused on your internal monitoring form and not enough on how customers actually feel about the quality of the interaction they recently had with

4 Turnover a New Leaf 4 your center/agent. All agents see are subjective check- marks on a form that is likely better suited for measuring compliance than quality. To get agents to embrace the quality monitoring process, let them have some input on what the form should contain, and, even more importantly, start incorporating direct customer feedback/ ratings (from post-transaction surveys) into agents overall quality scores. Your center doesn t fully embrace a culture of empowerment. Your contact center has failed to recognize and/ or act on the fact that agents possess a wealth of insight, and know your customers better than anyone. It s time to start empowering agents to use that insight and knowledge to improve existing processes and come up with new ones. This is probably the best way to continuously better the center while simultaneously making agents feel respected, valued and highly valuable. You ll be amazed by the positive impact their ideas and suggestions will have on operational efficiencies, revenue, customer satisfaction, and, to be sure, engagement and retention. Coaching & training continuously get buried beneath the queue. Agents are eager to continuously develop and add value, but your supervisors can t seem to find the time to stay on top of coaching and ongoing training. Your center needs to begin exploring feasible and effective ways to fit coaching and ongoing training into the schedule, such as using e-learning modules strategically, creating a peer mentoring program, and empowering agents to take on some supervisory tasks which will free supervisors up to conduct more coaching and training. Agent rewards & recognition programs are uninspired or non-existent. You re merely going through the motions in terms of motivating and recognizing front line staff hoping that such stale incentives as cookies and balloons will get agents to raise the roof performance-wise. Time to revamp your rewards & recognition programs with things like: a Wall of Fame that pays tribute to consistent high performers; opportunities to serve on important committees or task forces; nominations for external industry awards for front line staff; fun happy hours where agents get to socialize and receive public praise for their concerted effort, and inspired events and contents during Customer Service Week. Your contact center is handing the wrong people a headset. Maybe you are actually doing all the positive things suggested in this article, and are STILL struggling with low agent engagement and retention. Well, then you may want to take a close look at your recruiting and hiring practices. Regardless of how well you train, empower and reward staff, if you are attracting and selecting candidates who aren t cut out for contact center work or your company culture, you ll never foster the level of agent commitment or performance

5 Turnover a New Leaf 5 that s required to become a world- class customer care organization. Six Reasons Your Contact Center Agents Are Disengaged was authored by Greg Levin and was originally published at blog. intradiem.com. In our experience talking with call center executives all over the world, the most effective method to combat attrition and improve agent engagement outside of increasing salaries, which is often not in the call center s control is an approach that attacks the root causes across the entire agent lifecycle. This often includes: Hiring agents that are a good fit for the job Improving new hire training and nesting Increasing training and communications Implementing supervisor-agent coaching programs Promoting agent career paths Providing variety whenever possible Successful call centers have one thing in common: they invest in their agents success. Agent frustration and turnover are not limited to newly hired agents they may happen at any stage of the agent lifecycle and for many different reasons. Understanding the causes is the first step in improving it. Hiring the right agents for the job and then providing them with the training and coaching they need to do their jobs well leads to a more satisfied, engaged and effective agent workforce overall, which ultimately leads to more satisfied customers and stronger customer loyalty makes everyone happy! To learn more about our panelists or to read more articles about contact center culture, training, technology and measurement, visit: Improving/creating mentoring programs About Intradiem Intradiem is the leader in intraday automation solutions for multi-channel contact centers. Intradiem s customers achieve an invincible customer experience with a real-time workforce by automating manual processes such as intraday task management, intraday staffing, reskilling, channel balancing, and real-time alerts. Intradiem empowers an immediate and consistent response to unpredictable events and changing conditions, resulting in labor savings, improved employ-ee performance and a better overall customer experience. More than 200,000 contact center, field service, retail, bank branch, and back office employees around the world use Intradiem s solution every day.