Category: Customer Experience

At the end of a long work day of managing agents, customer queries, and high call volumes, call center leaders want to have achieved two fundamental goals: retain solid employees, and provide excellent customer service.
Call center managers are acutely aware that the industry faces some of the steepest staff turnover rates in the world. And it’s no surprise why: high call center attrition rates generally stem from poor company culture, stressful work environments, low pay, and overall agent dissatisfaction.
This is why every call center’s business strategy should analyze attrition rates (as well as strategies to mitigate them) in order to put employee retention first. Focusing on improving agent experience and giving staff the tools they need to do their job effectively, and happily, are key to the future success of a call center’s operations, after all.
A starting point for all of this is to calculate your call center’s attrition rate. So, let’s dive into what call center attrition is, what causes it, how to calculate it, and how to use it to inform employee retention strategies.
Your All-in-One Guide to Call Center Workforce Optimization
What is Call Center Attrition and Why is it Important?
Also known as “employee turnover,” call center attrition generally refers to agents that leave the job they were hired to do, and for various reasons. Involuntary attrition refers to employees that leave for extenuating circumstances (like relocation or illness). Voluntary attrition occurs when agents leave by their own choice, often due to undesirable working conditions or benefits – and it is now higher than ever.
But why does call center attrition matter? Isn’t it easy enough to hire more agents at a limited cost to business operations? Unfortunately no: attrition drains your existing resources by requiring more labor and time for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding. It may also be that the learning curve for newly-hired agents is higher, taking them at least a few months to be at peak performance. And, existing agents are forced to pick up the slack throughout this process, adding more stress to their workday.
Added to this challenging mix are dips in customer satisfaction and employee morale, and spikes in call center expenses. It is certainly a no-win situation.
What Causes Call Center Attrition?
The call center industry skews towards a few undesirable work qualities, leading employees to leave at disproportionately high rates. These include:
Poor Company Culture: Company culture includes a company’s values, strategic vision, and agent engagement strategies. If your contact center doesn’t have a clear strategy or values, agents will find it difficult to find meaning or fulfillment in the role. They may also grow frustrated by a seemingly absent management team.
Low Pay: The average US call center agent makes about $14.80/hour, about $2 lower than the national average.
Poor Training Programs: Similar to poor company culture, poor agent training programs make agents’ jobs more stressful. Without proper preparation for the work, agents are ill-equipped to satisfy customers and won’t feel a sense of accomplishment from their work.
Employee Burnout: Call center agents have to deal with angry customers every day. Added to this are the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic which has prompted agents to adopt even more empathy in the way they communicate with customers – this can ultimately be draining and stressful for them in the long run.
Lack of Technology: Call centers are considered behind the times if they haven’t invested in the right technology, especially with the recent rise in hybrid work contexts. Fonolo’s Visual IVR and Voice Call-Backs remove the burden of high call volumes from agents, allowing them to work more efficiently and with less stress.
Monotonous Work: Call center employees often do the same thing every day. If management isn’t attentive to who’s doing what and rotating job duties and challenges, agents may feel less enthusiastic about their roles, leading them to consider other options.
How to Calculate Attrition Rate in 3 Easy Steps
With that context, it’s time to consider ways to bolster employee retention and lessen turnover in your call center. Starting with a simple attrition calculation is a smart place to start: here’s how to do it.

Count how many agents quit in the past year.
Divide the number of attritions (agents that quit) by the average number of employees.
Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

Let’s look at an example for Contact Center A:

Agents that quit in 2020: 50
Average number of employees: 300
Attrition Rate = 100 (# of Attritions/Average # of Employees)
Attrition Rate = 100 (50/300)
Attrition Rate = 100 (0.167)
Attrition Rate = 16.7%

Now, is 16.7% considered a high attrition rate? Not really, but it’s not high when you compare it to the industry average: call centers in the US have an average attrition rate of between 30-45%.

FACT:
The average employee attrition rate for contact centers is between 30-45%.

Now that you know your call center attrition rate, it’s time to act on it.
How to Use Call Center Attrition Rate to Improve Customer Service and Employee Retention
Here are a few tips on how to use call center attrition rates to inform overall business strategies.
Look at attrition rates over time.
Attrition for one month or even one year won’t tell you what you need to know about your call center. While a low attrition rate like 16.7% might seem favorable at first, that perception could change if you realize that the rate has increased over the last few years. Always look at attrition rates over the long-term to better understand your staffing trends.
Calculate attrition rates every week or month.
Multiple years of attrition rates can help you assess whether call center agent turnover has improved or worsened. However, calculating attrition more frequently can help you pinpoint the problems in real-time. For example, if you notice a dramatic change in only a two-week period, it’s easier to isolate what could have happened to encourage this higher attrition.
Use attrition rates when making your business cases.
If you’re a call center manager that wants to improve your contact center’s performance and employee retention, be it through improved training programs, more robust call center technology, or even shuffled management, you can use attrition rates as hard evidence when making your business cases.
Call center executives listen when you tell them about attrition rates – they understand how it costs them customer service standards, further employee retention, time, and money. Leveraging your hard data to better your business operations is your best way forward.
Call center attrition is useless without nuance. Calculate it over the long-term and on a weekly basis to better pinpoint areas of improvement in your call center. #Employee retention #CallCenterMetricsClick To TweetThe post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

A friend is selling his house. Apparently, real estate brokers now have a way of reporting the comments (reviews) from potential buyers at open houses, and he was crazy enough to read them.

Of course, this is incredibly unhelpful. He can’t rebuild his house to sell it. Hearing that people don’t like his custom cabinets or the layout of the living room isn’t actionable–especially since the other half of the comments contradict the first half.

What’s actually happening is that someone who isn’t qualified or emotionally connected enough to make a purchase is looking for something to say. And humans are really bad at explaining our irrational feelings in the context of rational reasons. So we make stuff up.

And we’re equally bad at hearing comments about things we can’t change.

By all means, ask a second doctor before you get surgery. But in just about every public setting, the comments aren’t going to be particularly helpful.

The growth of e-commerce recently has been staggering. In 2020 alone, there was a 46.1% year-on-year increase in internet retail sales value in the UK. Of course, many consumers have been forced to shop online as a result of the pandemic, but this growth was still apparent before the pandemic struck. In such a highly…
The post Ending the post-purchase silence by offering customers more choice appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Every day, organisations enable a myriad of interactions with their customers and employees. Whether it’s an online shopper trying to purchase a new pair of shoes or a design engineer taking a leadership training course, companies provide experiences throughout every aspect of their operations. While it would be great for these interactions to create wonderful…
The post Picking up the pieces from five broken customer experiences   appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

CloudShare, the leading software experience platform, has announced a new integration with Salesforce. A platform designed to empower Sales Reps to make better business decisions based on data, leading to more conversions and sales success.    During the pandemic, B2B sales reps have increasingly looked to online solutions to enhance their customer acquisition and retention efforts….
The post CloudShare and Salesforce unite for retention efforts appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

“Twenty-four ninety-five.”

I was on the phone hearing a pitch for a service I needed. I had reached out to a recommended vendor, and was now sitting through a pitch from a salesperson who had a script but no listening skills.

I had figured that the service was probably $300 if I shopped around, but I was willing to pay a bit more than that if it would save time.

Finally, the script-reader got to the price.

“It’s 24.95.”

I paused for a second. “You mean it’s twenty four dollars and ninety-five cents?”

“No,” he said.

“Oh… you meant to say two-thousand-four-hundred-and-ninety-five dollars…”

Why would you write the script to anchor the price at 1% of what it really costs?

Instead of a fruitless hustle, two other stories could have worked better.

A competent salesperson could have said, “Some of our competitors charge $300 and some charge $5,000. We’re right in the middle and I can tell you why.”

Or perhaps they could have said, “Some people charge as little as $300 for this. Let me tell you why we charge a lot more than that, and why it might be a smart choice for you.”

In both cases, the truth becomes a firm foundation for a story about value and position.

Money is a story we tell ourselves about value, status and position.

US CXA® is so much more than just a competition. It is a place to share knowledge, connect with America’s leading CX experts, and recognize the fantastic results of CX teams across the United States – all while having an amazing experience with your team!   With that in mind, we’d like to remind our entrants…
The post The US CXA® early bird entry is open until February 25  appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Social niceties are easy to do half-heartedly.

But they’re not for us, they’re for the other person.

When you show up begrudgingly, it’s not half-hearted, it’s cold hearted.

A handshake, a greeting, the way we sit in a meeting or wear a mask–it’s a chance to connect and to make a difference for the person we’re with.

All in, or not at all.

When Google or Facebook or Spotify decide what you’ll see next, they’re making a choice.

That’s very different from an open platform like “podcasting” or “blogging” (in quotes with no capital letters, because no one is in charge.)

Being in charge implies that choices are being made. And people who are in charge–even if it’s just one person in charge of their own voice–are choosing.

Choosing is a form of selection, of amplification and of curation. Not official government censorship, but something more nuanced than that, the responsibility that comes from choice.

In many parts of our culture, particularly pockets of tech, it’s fashionable to talk about ‘free speech’ and ‘open platforms’ as if they’re unalloyed virtues. But the moment Apple puts a podcast on its home page, Google decides to put this blog in your promo folder, or Spotify decides to promote one song or podcast over another, the platform is no longer truly open. Often, individuals and organizations use terms like this when they’re defending something that isn’t helpful to the people who encountered it.

When money enters the picture, it’s even more complicated. There’s a difference between a truly open platform and an algorithm staffed by people who put one sort of website on their spam list and another highly ranked, simply because they make more of a profit on the second one. Or when YouTube or Spotify pay people a thousand (or two hundred million) dollars to host their content…

Ideas shared create value. Good ideas are the engine of our future. We’ve seen that when creators of ideas take responsibility for their work, it’s more likely that we all benefit.

Wide-open platforms almost always lead to chaos, negative side effects and anonymous spam. I’m in favor of choice, especially when it’s made by organizations and individuals willing to be held responsible for the choices they make.

As we head further into 2022, it’s apparent that companies are picking up steam and looking ahead to the future of their experience practices (customer experience, employee experience, and beyond).
If you’re looking for resources to share with your team on experience leadership, I encourage you to look take a look at the authors on this year’s Global Gurus list of customer experience leaders for inspiration (a sincere thank you to Global Gurus for including me in the list once again).
Over the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing many of the people on the list, so I’ve pulled out some of my favorite highlights from our conversations that look to the future of experience leadership.
1. Know Your Guardrails
“Who are we together and how do we figure out solutions to the problems?” asks my friend Chip Bell, whose latest book is Inside Your Customer’s Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions. In our conversation, he talks about the importance of grounding your company in your principles and guardrails to set your team up for success through a shared and establish culture.
Building a strong foundation for future planning is the start.
Listen to or watch the full interview »
 
2. Move with Purpose
In our discussion about his book, Stronger Through Adversity: World Class Leaders Share Pandemic-Tested Lessons on Thriving During the Toughest Challenges, my friend Joseph Michelli talks about moving with purpose or “innovating at work speed.” He explains that it’s about caring what needs to be done today in order to keep a customer or employee.
In other words, there may be things that you have laid out on your map or journey that you’ve phased out to be done over the next few months or years and you will have to figure out how to get it done over the next few weeks. For instance, during the pandemic, most companies had no choice but to quickly figure out how to accommodate digital and no-touch services, even though it may not have been in their immediate business plans.
Listen to or watch the full interview »
 
3. Think Beyond “Interim Normal”
In my conversation with Brian Solis, he says, “Looking out between now and over the course of 18-24-36 months, and breaking out into different stages where of course, yes, we have to react, stabilize, ensure business continuity, but with COVID, instead of calling it a ‘new normal,’ it’s the interim normal, right? […] It’s an interim period, and it’s the time to think about business continuity. What’s next? What can I learn from all of this so that we thrive, so that we innovate, we iterate for the future, which gives us a sense of purpose.”
Beyond the challenges of this moment, brands must look ahead to think about the bigger picture of what CX could look like.
Listen to or watch the full interview »
 
4. Move from Best in Industry to World Class
“Forget about our competition. What companies outside of our industry do we love doing business with? And why? It doesn’t matter how big or small,” says Shep Hyken. In our conversation about his book, I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again & Again, Shep and I discuss six easy steps to systematically building a loyal customer base.
Listen to or watch the full interview »
 
5. Build Your Legacy: What’s Your “Three Blocks Long”? 
How will you be remembered? How do you want people to recall who you are as people? What behaviors do you want to define you? How do you improve lives? That’s your “Three blocks long.” Over my 35 years in this industry, I’ve built a library of resources to help you start the process to find YOUR three blocks long and start to look beyond what your brand is known for now and towards what you’ll be remembered for long-term.
Download resources here »

Want to get more inspiration from customer experience leaders from every industry? Be sure to subscribe to my podcast. It’s been my gift to you to host over 200 episodes of my podcast, the Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show, featuring corporate and non-profit executives from across the C-Suite, as well as thought leaders, focused on doing the work of experience.
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