As call center turnover is a big problem for almost every call center in the world, knowing how to retain your employees is a big competitive advantage.
First of all, finding new employees is expensive, and secondly – it’s time-consuming.
It includes not only direct expenses on hiring, but also training costs, additional expenses on supervisors’ work, and so on. When it comes to calculating the price of an agent replacement, it finds out that it can cost up to 50% of his or her annual salary.
It sounds even more terrifying when we discover that average call center turnover rates are between 30 to 40%, somewhere coming to 50%. Are you ready for such expenses on hiring process? Agent turnover is a threat, and dealing with staff turnover will improve your level of service, help to meet customer expectations, improve customer retention rates and boost employee satisfaction.
Even if we imagine that you have unlimited budget for managing your call center – which isn’t true, is it? – it is still silly to spend that much money on just replacing workers – especially if we take into account that such a regular replacement destroys internal environment and makes it impossible to build a real team, not just a buch of temporary idlers.
With such awful attrition rates, lack of job satisfaction, lack of career development opportunities, manual repetitive tasks and poor performance it is vital to know not only how to ensure employee retention and reduce annual turnover rates, but how to help agents provide exceptional customer service, move up on career path and reach their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
So, let’s learn the best practices for retaining call center employees.
Top 10 Best Practice Tips to Retain Call center Employees
1. Provide scheduling flexibility
First of all, one of a few advantages of working in a call center is an option to choose flexible schedules. We don’t know why, but some call center managers think that offering inflexible 5/2 schedule for call center employees who are already frustrated with low salaries and high workload is a good idea – while it isn’t.
Take into consideration that most of call center agents are students and they have to balance their studies with working shifts – not offering such option will increase your turnover sky-high.
2. Invest in training programs
No one is going to do the same things for years without any career and professional development – people either leave such work or start doing it awfully until they are fired. Thus, your goal is to show that you value your employees by providing them an option to learn and train, thus improving their professional skills.
The fact is people seek for two things the most (when it comes to job seeking) – money and career opportunities. Experienced call center managers know that there is no way to get professional agents without training them – isn’t that obvious for a job where 99% of employees have no work experience?
Providing training opportunities doesn’t only improve agent performance, but it also helps employer to find talents and let the team grow – we all know that success is build by teams, not individuals.
3. Share knowledge
Employees want to be engaged in the life of company in other ways than just answering customer calls. They are people who represent the company in front of customers, so they deserve a right to be communicated with from the side of upper management.
It is a good idea to not only adopt regular meetings for employees from different departments to share information and exchange thoughts, but also to adopt such things as, for instance, luch and learn -a practice of having luch together and talking about company’s projects, products, policies and culture. That’s not only the way to let agents learn more about the company, but also a good option to build healthy environment.
Agents have to know some basic concepts, such as customer satisfaction, customer experience, company culture, etc. Onboarding process isn’t enough to provide such knowledge, so contact center executives have to provide speific mentorship programs and make sure that team leaders will help agents gain knowledge.
4. Offer remote or hybrid work opportunities
Remote working isn’t something new these days, as since the pandemic, numerous companies have adopted this workforce management model as their primary one. In fact, there are teams that rejected fully remote mode because not everyone likes it – some people lack live communication with colleagues, while others can’t manage their time and efforts while being out of the office. Nonetheless, there are also people who show higher efficiency when working remotely – and for such people it is stupid to not let them work that way, because thus your company loses an opportunity. All latest research shows that many teams show higher effectiveness in remote working mode, and if you don’t accept such workforce management model, there is always a compromise – an option to use hybrid working model where some employees work remotely, while others have both inhouse and remote days.
5. Play Some Games
You definitely need to become a leader of your team – but first of all, you have to build a team. In call centers it is difficult to build a stable team, because of above-mentioned turnover rates and also because of lack of internal communication. Your goal is to get rid of these negative factors – and the best way to build trust and build closer relationships with employees is to spend time together during non-working activities. We all have to agree that our life isn’t only about job, so try to add some fun into your everyday working routine – it will be a good idea for both your employees and you.
Well, that’s not the end of the story – let’s continue later with other second part of other 5 tips to improve your agent retention.