How to Optimize Call Center Agent Onboarding

What’s the secret to delivering good customer service?

Answers may vary. But it usually hinges on having willing and able call center agents and clerks who can answer customer questions and solve their problems.

Installing such people all starts with good recruitment and onboarding efforts.

As we all know, good recruitment entails identifying and hiring individuals that exhibit good listening and communication skills, a positive attitude, a strong work ethic, great references, and preferably some experience in customer service.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to educate these individuals on the specifics of how your organization conducts business. That information transferral may occur via company documents you share with new hires, classroom training, individual instruction, online videos and articles, or some combination of these things.

To ensure consistency and that you don’t overlook any important information, create checklists, documents, workflows and other repeatable and reusable materials and processes to guide your HR leaders and managers and new hires through the onboarding effort.

A big upfront data download is inevitable during new hire onboarding. But try to break things down a bit so new hires get information in more digestible doses.

Giving new hires the chance to ask questions and voice answers and concerns during onboarding can make the process more fun and increase agent retention of new information. And assigning each of these individuals a mentor can provide them with touchpoint to guide them along their employment journey.

Providing agents with a knowledge base and other tools and opportunities through which to find answers and build their skills over time can also go a long way toward driving employee engagement, lowering agent churn, and improving the customer experience.

That’s important for call centers, which which 30 to 45 percent is the standard agent turnover rate. The average cost to replace a frontline employee is between $10,000 and $15,000 per person. That means a call center with just 100 full-time workers and a 30 percent attrition rate incurs in $300,000 in annual costs.

“Too many agents report that after being hired, they are given the briefest of training and put on the phones to sink or swim,” former TMCnet contributor Tracey E. Schelmetic reported back in 2014. “The problem is that you can’t treat your customers like guinea pigs for new or unprepared agents. This risks harming valuable customer relationships, and can erode a company’s brand and reputation very quickly. It’s therefore critical to have a good plan to onboard agents, and tailor each plan to an agent’s existing skills, experience, and personality.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle