Call Recording Featured Article

The conventional wisdom for trying to keep agent attrition down in the contact center generally comes down to cost. A constant need to replace agents costs money and time, and new agents are less skilled than experienced agents, which negatively affects the customer relationship. Make a list of the ways high attrition costs companies money, and you’d fill a piece of paper in no time at all: high recruitment and training costs for the HR department, high costs in time and money to continually train new agents, weeks of wasted time each year for managers who should be managing, lost goodwill and opportunities from customers paired with newbie agents, and low agent morale from seeing a constant revolving door of coworkers.

But it turns out that money and time may not be the only things lost by high turnover in the contact center. No one misses a truly bad agent when he or she is gone, but what about the good ones that had potential? It’s possible that these people simply aren’t replaceable. The recently released 2016 Talent Trends by Randstad Sourceright found that 72 percent of HR directors, talent and business leaders surveyed worldwide reported talent scarcity has negatively affected their business, and 45 percent said it has threatened leadership continuity and succession.

In plain speaking, it’s simply getting very hard to hire good talent, and the very definition of “good talent” is someone who can flourish in the high-pressure (and not very high pay) environment of the contact center.

“Each year sees the emergence of new challenges in talent management, opportunities to improve existing processes and promising techniques and technologies that will disrupt the status quo,” said Rebecca Henderson, chairman, global leadership team of Randstad Sourceright and group president, Talent Solutions, Randstad US, in a release. “As the workforce management and technology landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, HR and talent leaders must understand how they can leverage new tools and capitalize on the power of talent analytics to adapt their strategies and account for these changing trends.”

One of the “new tools” that need to be leveraged is modern workforce optimization, which can help reduce the stress and improve employee engagement in the contact center. A tool that helps managers help agents build a better work experience is a first and major step in getting control of high agent turnover. While companies constructively monitor the customer experience, it’s important to remember that they also have the ability to monitor the agent experience, and red flags in the latter can help managers take action before it’s too late and the agent has handed in his or her notice. Workforce management, which is usually the other component of workforce optimization, can ensure that schedules are not too onerous, agents are able to bid for time off according to pre-set criteria (seniority, for example) and that there are enough resources available to meet the forecast so agents aren’t getting slammed with high call volumes, which can be stressful.

Many managers in the call center industry speak of high turnover rates – there are some organizations that experience turnover rates in excess of 100 percent per year – as if they were a source of pride. In the current climate, however, a very different mindset is required: one that treats agents as precious capital who are worth making an effort to retain. Anything less is literally draining the company’s bottom line.