What is the BIGGEST challenge in the contact center today? If we were to conduct a poll of contact center managers, we would likely find that the biggest challenge in the contact center is agent attrition or turnover. Historically, this has been the case as well. Year after year, agent turnover seems to be the biggest problem in the contact center. It’s important to understand that a certain amount of turnover is normal; employees come and go, people get promoted and turnover happens. However, knowing the percentage of turnover you are experiencing and why can be very helpful in identifying problems and then coming up with clear solutions to fix the turnover problem. Jeff Toister, of Toister Performance Solutions, offers this formula for determining your turnover rate and how to account for various factors that affect it.
Employee Separations / Active Employee Count = Turnover Rate
Employee Separations is the number of employees who have left over the course of a year. The Active Employee count is the number of employees you have. If you have 100 employees and 40 of them leave over the course of a year, then your employee turnover looks like this.
40/100 = 40%
This translates to a 40% turnover rate within your contact center. That’s a fairly high turnover rate. However, it is important to take into account the reason for these turnovers: are employees quitting, getting fired, or are they getting promoted within the company and that is causing the turnover? This is known as Good turnover vs. Bad turnover. Here’s how to differentiate:
Employee Terminations + Employee Quits / Active Employee Count = Bad Turnover Rate
So, out of these 40, 10 were promoted (Good turnover) 25 quit (bad turnover) and 5 were fired (bad turnover) Here’s how that would be calculated:
(5+25=30)/100 = 30% Turnover Rate
That’s a significantly better turnover rate than 40% but it’s still rather high and definitely warrants a close look at the root cause of the turnover and how it can be corrected.
TEN WAYS TO FIX TURNOVER
During the course of our twenty-year history here at Centris, we have learned and implemented principles that have proven to help minimize the amount of turnover we experience in our contact centers. We believe these are tried and true principles that can fix agent turnover in any contact center.
- Hire for Culture– In other words, during the interview process, determine if the candidate is a good fit for your workplace. One of the best ways to do this is to have a clear picture of what your ideal candidate looks like based on your company culture. If the candidate fits your profile, they will likely be a good fit for your organization.
- Provide Adequate Training-This may seem like a very simple solution, but it’s surprising how many contact centers fail in this area. If an agent does not feel equipped to handle the tasks of their job, this will quickly lead to frustration and a dissatisfied employee who will quickly look elsewhere for employment. Here at Centris, we take a period of several weeks to train a new hire. Each new hire spends a few weeks learning our system and our way of doing things before they begin customer interaction. Once they are ready to help customers, they are assigned a peer coach who is there to help them with issues that may arise during the course of a call. We provide each new hire a solid foundation as well assurance that they will have the support once they are engaging with customers.
- Empower your Agents- Part of effective training is giving your agents the power and the authority to handle customer problems without always having to seek management approval. At Centris, we see this as a very critical component to agent satisfaction as well as the customer experience. In the contact center, helping the customer is what it’s all about. Resolving their issue the first time they call, regardless of how long that may take, is the priority for us at Centris. Empowering our agents to make decisions during the course of a customer interaction is the key to bringing about a resolution that provides an excellent customer experience.
- Offer career advancement- When employees feel they have a future at an organization, they will be much more inclined to stay and work their way up the ladder. As mentioned above, one of the tools we use is that of a Peer coach to help new hires once they start dealing with customers. Not only has this served as great motivation for those entrusted with being a Peer coach, it has also proved to be a good tool for identifying those agents who would be good candidates for management positions.
- Provide good pay and benefits– Again, this may sound overly simple, but it is very important to provide pay and benefits that allow people to support themselves and their families. When people are well paid, they feel valued and when people feel valued, they are much more likely to stay loyal to their company.
- Provide adequate breaks for agents– Dealing with customers can be a stressful situation. Much of the time customers are calling with a problem and they are stressed themselves. It is important that agents have an opportunity to walk away from their work station and take some time to decompress or regroup after a difficult call. Burn out is a common problem in the contact center and providing opportunities for agents to take breaks is essential to combatting agent burn out.
- Keep communication open-. Making sure everyone feels they have a channel of communication, that they “feel heard” when there is a problem is extremely important. This is all part of developing a positive work culture that will build loyalty and a desire to stay.
- Get feedback from your staff- Getting feedback from agents is also an important tool in countering agent turnover. Ask them questions such as: “What do you like about your job?” “What would you like to see change?” “Are you feeling challenged in your job?” It’s important that those in leadership know what’s going on with their employees and that managers do their best to address any issues that could become problems. This should occur on an on-going basis, long before agents may give notice of moving on to other employment.
- Identify problems quickly– If you do start to notice negative patterns emerging in your contact center, it is important to get to the bottom of that quickly. For example, is there high turnover rate once agents reach a certain level? Is there a high turnover rate under a particular manager? These are the types of situations that need to be addressed quickly and resolved as soon as possible.
- Do an Employee Satisfaction survey- In this industry, Customer Satisfaction Surveys are the norm, but what about Employee Satisfaction Surveys? Implementing a survey that employees take that allows them to make suggestions, voice concerns and feel they have some input into their organization can be a very effective tool to minimize turnover. Let’s face it: when employees are happy in their work, they will provide a much better experience for their customers.
Over the years, we have found that being true to these principles has brought our contact centers a tremendous amount of stability, which has, in turn, enabled us to consistently deliver an excellent customer experience. If you are looking for a contact center that offers an experienced team of well-trained agents who are committed to delivering an excellent customer experience every time, contact us; we’d love to help you too.
