Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Importance of Scheduling Employee Collaboration in the Contact Center
While all businesses need to keep an eye on employee turnover, some industries see more than others. The call center industry has been plagued by high turnover since its origins, with some high-pressure contact centers seeing people leave the job in excess of 100 percent per year. While this is extreme, the average contact center sees turnover as high as 40 percent per year.
When you consider how much it costs a businesses to keep replacing its employees – recruiting, hiring and training are full time-jobs in the call center – it’s worth examining precisely why call center agents are so likely to leave their jobs. According to a recent article by Alison Griswold writing for Business Insider, it’s the nature of the work that’s partly to blame.
“Already irritated people call in, suffer through long hold periods, become even more annoyed, and then take that frustration out on the employee that eventually ends up on the call's receiving end,” she writes.
Employees get burned out quickly when they are overworked, have too few resources to do their jobs or don’t have enough breaks to take the pressure off. This is why effective contact center scheduling is so critical…ensuring that employees have the breaks they need and are actually taking them. The scheduling components helps ensure that the call and contact queues are still sufficiently staffed even while employees are taking breaks, so they’re not doing it at the expense of customer service quality.
But there are other factors at work, as a recent Bank of American initiative to reduce contact center turnover found. The company examined the habits of best practices call centers, and found that organizations with lower turnover had something in common: employees were collaborating with co-workers more often, receiving intra-office support to do their jobs.
"They found out that the biggest predictor for performance was looking at who you talked to among your colleagues," Ben Waber, author of "People Analytics" and a visiting scientist at the MIT (News - Alert) Media Lab told Business Insider. "That single metric was six times more predictive than any other."
This, too, was accomplished via ensuring that employees had enough breaks to be able to speak with coworkers.
“Bank of America had traditionally asked call center employees to take breaks that didn't coincide with anyone else's,” writes Griswold. “People would overlap lunches by just 15 minutes or so, which was when 80 percent of interactions took place.”
Breaks are critical not only to take the pressure off employees, but also to allow them to communicate with coworkers, sharing knowledge and experiences and building team feelings. This is a critical factor to keep in mind when scheduling employees. While the “nose to the grindstone” model may work in the short term for many contact centers, in the long-run, cultivating a positive company culture through collaboration may go much further.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi