Call Center Management Featured Article
In 2016, Take Steps to Lower Attrition in the Contact Center
In January, most contact centers begin to slow down from the holiday rush. The returns are complete, and customers simply aren’t in a buying mode (they need to catch up with the bills from the holidays!) It’s often a quiet time for call volume, except perhaps for companies that offer winter seasonal services, like heating oil, plowing or winter sports gear. It’s a great time to sit down and begin solving some of the problems that traditionally plague contact centers during busy times. One of the biggest, of course, is agent attrition.
There are many reasons why agents leave. Call center work is often poorly paid, so agents are willing to flee to another job at the promise of an extra 50 cents per hour (that’s an extra $80 a week!) Bad managers or toxic coworkers are another major reason why agents churn. (Ask any experienced contact center agent about his or her most horrific “Nightmare Boss” stories, and you’d probably be amazed.) Boredom or burnout (or both) may be another reason. There’s also the fact that contact center work is stressful: it’s the only job in which the very point of it is to listen to complaints and stories about dysfunction.
Whatever the reason, agent attrition costs the contact center industry overall millions (if not billions) every year, and individual companies tens of thousands that could be spent in better places. It’s simply too expensive a problem to ignore, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Given the investment required to hire and train a replacement every time an agent decides he or she has had enough, it is critical for managers to hire wisely, and take whatever actions are feasible to create a more positive professional environment,” he wrote.
So how do you get a grip on attrition and make some effective efforts to lower it? There are two ways you can do it: before hiring agents, and after.
Before hiring. It’s critical that you hire the right kind of people. Good call center agents that will stick around are not reactionaries, and they don’t take the job personally. They have a knack for empathizing and calming people down. Most importantly, be honest in your hiring process that the job won’t be suited for everyone (or even most people).
“Perfection may not be possible, but by presenting a more detailed sense of your company culture, the specific nature of incoming calls and other variables that are specific to your contact center, managers are more likely to weed out candidates that won’t be able to cope,” wrote Ciarlo.
You may even want to consider playing some real recorded calls to the potential hire – consider looking for a call in which the customer started out angry but the agent successfully managed to “talk him down” as an example of some of the hurdles that might be faced in the job.
After hiring. For the agents already in place, extra training to help deal with angry or contentious customers can help. It also helps to identify the triggers for angry customers. Many customers don’t start out angry…they become that way when they perceive the agent is patronizing them or providing incorrect information.
“They call with what they believe is a reasonable request or a simple question, only to be put on hold, or transferred from agent to agent, or asked to repeat their contact information three times,” wrote Ciarlo. Result – what should have been an uneventful call morphs into the kind that contributes to agent burnout.”
Poll your agents (or scour recorded calls) to find out what set customers off. Was it the long hold time? The transfers? The agent advising the customer to “calm down”? (No one, in the history of humanity, has ever responded well to the phrase “calm down” by actually calming down.) Identify the causes, and take real steps to eliminate them from the customer experience.
“Is there a way to reduce transfers by giving the agent more autonomy to solve the customer’s problem?” asks Ciarlo. “Would a workforce management solution boost the accuracy of forecasting and scheduling, so there are always enough agents to handle incoming calls? Would an investment in speech analytics deliver data that helps to anticipate a caller’s needs, so that call can be routed more efficiently or resolved in a shorter time?”
Finally, consider giving your agents some ways to decompress. A good break room with video games might help, as might a “relaxation room” with loungers and ambient music. Demonstrate your appreciation for their hard work, recognize them and ensure they’re being managed fairly by call center managers. Your efforts will pay for themselves in lower attrition.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi