Category: Customer Experience

We’ve all heard about the human touch and how important it is in the CX and call center spaces. Your customers want thoughtful and empathetic service, and that’s not something you can get from technology alone.
So why do call centers struggle with retaining their agents? There are a lot of factors that contribute to agent turnover and attrition, and those challenges have increased even more thanks to the Great Resignation.
So how do you retain the best skilled agents for your business? That’s what we’re here to explore. Read on to find out the best call center retention strategies to guide your efforts.
A Quick Introduction to Call Center Retention
Let’s begin with the basics. When we talk about call center retention, we’re referring to your business’ ability to keep the agents you’ve hired and trained. Every manager knows that new hires are extremely costly, and even more expensive to replace. With strong call center retention, you can save a lot of money on turnover down the line.
It should come as no surprise that the call center industry experiences high turnover rates. According to QATC, the annual average turnover rate for call centers is between 30%-45%. Losing agents at this rate has a serious impact on quality of service, as skilled agents take a lot of time and resources to hire and train. Your customers are looking for knowledgeable and experienced support professionals to help them, and that is difficult to achieve with staff constantly entering and exiting your contact center.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in Today’s Contact Center
How to Calculate Turnover Rates
To measure agent retention, you’ll need to calculate your team’s turnover rate. Let’s say you want to calculate your monthly turnover rate. Here’s the formula you need to figure that out:

(# of employees who left this month) ÷ (Average number of call center agents on your team) × 100% = Turnover rate

For instance, if your call center has an average of 100 agents, but 10 agents departed in the past month, your formula would read: (10 ÷ 100) x 100 = 10%
Call center turnover rates should be calculated regularly. Once you have several months of data logged, you should start to see patterns emerge.
5 Great Call Center Retention Strategies
Ask yourself: what are the most common reasons agents leave? How can you improve your overall agent experience? Start paying attention to these factors, and you’ll be in a better position to lower your turnover rate.
There are many factors that play into agent turnover, including negative work culture, poor hiring and onboarding experiences, not having the right tools and resources to do their job, and more. Follow these surefire strategies, and you will soon start to see improved retention for your call center.
1. Follow best practices in hiring
When your contact center is short-staffed, your leadership team may be tempted to rush hiring. But this can cause huge problems down the line.
Why? Finding the right fit for your team means finding individuals who are well suited to call center work. Not everyone will rise to the challenge, so it’s important to ensure the people you hire have the right foundational skills and attributes. Otherwise, you risk losing them sooner than later.
Here are some tips for hiring new agents:

Create employee profiles. Before you hire anyone new, you should know what you are looking for. An employee profile will act as your roadmap during the process.
Focus on aptitudes, not just experience. Ask interviewees about their work style, how they motivate themselves, and critical thinking.
Ask situational questions. Agents need to be able to handle different support scenarios, so this is a fantastic way to measure their problem-solving skills.

2. Invest in training and onboarding
Starting a new job can be stressful all on its own. But if your new hires don’t receive the proper support to get them started on the right foot, they’ll soon begin to plan their exit.
ASAPP research reports that 51% of respondents who received poor training felt pessimistic about their careers, leading to burnout and poor performance. Here are some tips for upgrading your training and onboarding efforts:

Use different training styles. Not everyone learns the same way, so be sure to offer classroom learning as well as hands-on learning opportunities for your agents.
Introduce your new hires to the team. This small but significant gesture can help your new hires feel at home with their new coworkers sooner.
Provide ongoing training. Training should not just be for new hires. Offering regular sessions for your more experienced agents will keep them engaged and connected with their work.

The Ultimate Guide to Call Center Training
3. Develop a positive company culture
From agents to managers to directors, all contact center professionals can attest to the impact company culture has on their daily work. Employees who are engaged in your culture are less likely to leave — that makes this an important part of your agent retention strategy,
Here are just a few things you can do to improve your company culture:

Identify existing challenges. If your current work culture isn’t where it needs to be, pinpoint the issues and develop a plan to remedy them. Trust us, these issues won’t disappear on their own!
Check in with your managers. Your managers are the ones with the most influence over your agents’ work experience. Offer managers training on how to create a productive and positive work environment!
Conduct culture interviews. Ensure your new hires fit in with the rest of the team by inviting them to a more casual-style interview with a few of your team members.
Prioritize work-life balance. Offer your agents perks and benefits to support life inside and outside of work. This can include flexible work hours, recreational memberships, and more.

FACT:
In a Gallup poll, 75% of respondents voluntarily left a position because of their boss, not the job itself.

4. Provide the right tools and resources
Call center work is not exactly stress-free. While you can’t eliminate the element of pressure from customer support, you can make the agent experience more manageable and rewarding.
Contact center software has come a long way, with tools smart enough to automate the more mundane and repetitive parts of agent work. By investing in these tools, you create a more enjoyable and engaging work experience for your agents.
There are countless tools on the market, so we’ve listed our top categories below:

Call-back technology. This incredible tool helps lower your call volumes while offering callers an alternative to waiting on hold. Fewer frustrated customers means happier agents!
AI assist. Artificial intelligence is the ultimate agent assistant, automating simple and repetitive tasks so your agents can focus on more complex tasks, like supporting customers.
Self-service tools. Like AI, self-service tools are meant to address simpler customer queries while alleviating the burden of work from your agents.

5. Provide growth opportunities
Did you know that lack of career development opportunities has been tied to high turnover? Your employees are looking for a future with your organization, and that includes exploring new positions and promotions.
There are lots of ways to foster growth opportunities with your call center. Here are some strategies to get your started:

Offer one-on-one reviews. Have managers set time aside for each agent, and give them the opportunity to provide feedback on what they hope to accomplish in their current role and beyond.
Create a career plan. Implementing and regularly updating a career plan will help illustrate your agents’ progression towards their career goals with the company.
Create a mentorship program. Give your veteran agents an opportunity to take the lead and mentor your newer agents. This will help them develop leadership skills for their next big opportunity!
The post 5 Great Call Center Agent Retention Strategies first appeared on Fonolo.

One way to show status is by demonstrating how many resources you have. A bespoke suit, a huge graduation party, a fancy building… A bully who physically intimidates or an angry driver who cuts you off in traffic are each working to show their status and strength.

But it’s also possible to demonstrate security and confidence by doing precisely the opposite. The billionaire in a t-shirt. The person who holds the door open and lets you go first in line… these are also demonstrations of status.

The interesting question isn’t whether someone has status. It’s whether they’re gutsy enough to demonstrate it by making things better for others.

At Customer Experience Magazine, we put gender equality at the centre of our content strategy. More than 80% of our contributors are women, powerful CX leaders, consultants, solution designers, and innovators. We advocate for hearing female voices – so much so that 70% of our top contributors of 2022 were women! We’re a safe space for…
The post Top ten CXM interviews with women in leadership appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

There is no force more powerful than a woman determined to rise! However, common misconceptions that plague our nation’s STEM industries could mean that not enough women are given the necessary confidence, tools, and opportunities to begin a career in these subjects. Let’s take the UK tech industry, for example. A report discovered that only 17% of the IT sector’s workforce is made up of females. With young, impressionable women exposed to misleading and inaccurate theories, it’s no…
The post Debunking the four misconceptions of women in tech appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

I was born and raised in an Indian joint family with a variety of age groups under one roof. This helped broaden my horizons of different perceptions from an early age. My grandparents were never tech-savvy and always struggled with any kind of digital activity. They would just ask their grandkids to get the job…
The post Accessible design: creating a positive experience for elderly customers appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

According to Gartner research, CX is recognised as a priority with 76% of executive leaders surveyed indicating they see CX as critical to meeting the organisation’s business goals. Organisations with an effective CX strategy were less impacted by revenue loss during the pandemic years.   While encouraging to see the emphasis being placed on CX by leadership, what specific strategies do organisations need to focus on…
The post Four CX investments that organisations should prioritise in 2023 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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Not all projects become t-shirt brands, nor should they.

The risk is in thinking you’re building one when you’re not. T-shirt worthy brands are a very small subset of the whole.

The question is: Would your customers want to wear your logo on a t-shirt?

Why?

If you’re creating identity, possibility, connection and giving folks status, it’s easy to see how you could build a t-shirt brand in just about any field. Sports teams do it for a living. Google had a t-shirt brand for a long time, and so does Penguin Magic and even Festool. I’m not sure, though, that many people want a t-shirt from BMO bank, Marriott or International Paper. Netflix might be, Roku isn’t. Of course, no t-shirt brand is for everyone, that’s part of the point.

If you’re simply providing a good service at a good price, perhaps you don’t need to go to all those meetings and waste so much time and money on “branding.”

Why would someone want to wear your name around town? What’s in it for them? Go build that and the t-shirts will take care of themselves.

If we’re lucky, we invent something that’s going to be in high demand. Reservations at a hot restaurant. Limited edition trading cards. Concert tickets…

How to decide who gets them?

One attractive option is “first-come-first-served.” It feels fair, after all. The theory is that people who really want what you have will spend time (waste time) in line to show their commitment. But of course, this is a tax, and an uneven one at that, since some people value their time more than others.

Another is to simply auction off the scarce items. The good news is that the value of the scarce item won’t be squandered on time wasting, but will go to the company. But this might feel unfair, as it rewards people with more assets, as so many things do. On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that people allocate resources differently than we might expect.

The third method, the fairest of all, is to have a lottery. Invite your best customers, or charge a commitment fee, and then randomly allocate the loot. The good news is that you won’t alienate customers who feel as though it’s their fault that they didn’t wait in line long enough, or spend enough.

Each decision has effects. And it’s up to the producer to decide which emotions they want to be responsible for creating.

I started agitating for this in 1997 and wrote about it in 2006. The problem with the magical medium of email is that it’s an open API. Anyone with a computer can plug into it, without anyone’s consent.

This creates an asymmetric attention problem. The selfish, short-term-thinking sender benefits by emailing as many people as possible, and the recipients suffer.

This doesn’t happen with traditional mail, because there’s a cost to sending it.

With GPT arriving, expect that spam is going to increase 100x, and that it will be eerily personalized, invasive and persistent. That it will be really difficult to believe that an email isn’t junk, because there’s going to be so much junk, and it’s going to be harder to filter.

And yet, email is powerful, and convenient and we’ve been using it for our entire careers. Is it doomed?

Some apps are showing up that are trying to create a paywall for email. An unknown sender has to make a donation to charity (the recipient specifies the amount) to reach your inbox. People have tried this off and on for decades, but it’s hard. There are two problems with this being widely adopted.

The first is that it creates an attention obligation on the part of the recipient. It’s socially awkward to sell access to your inbox and then ignore the email.

The second is that there isn’t much of a network effect, and while a few people might adopt it, the problems with email don’t improve unless it’s widespread and persistent.

Here’s an alternative:

A simple plugin for gmail (and then, eventually other providers) that tags the email you send and receive.

Senders who send more than 50 emails a day need to buy “stamps”, perhaps for a penny each. The money goes into escrow.

Recipients can easily mark an email as unwanted. They can also upvote an email, which will send a signal that allows their peers to be sure they don’t ignore what they just got.

If enough people mark your emails as unwanted, you lose your escrow, it goes to a worthy cause. If it’s legit, the escrow remains and you don’t have to buy more stamps.

If a sender doesn’t use the system, they’re not going to be able to reach any of the people who do. So not many people have to be early adopters before it becomes widespread–if you want to reach most people (and you don’t know which people have it and which don’t) you’re going to need to turn on the tagging. It’s a tiny cost to pay for attention in a world where attention is scarce.

Normal people won’t have to pay anything, and email will get better for them as senders and receivers. And businesses that mean well and do well ought to be happy to pay.

If too many senders view the penny stamp as a chance to spam people (and lose the penny) then just increase the cost of the stamp to a nickel, etc. Pretty soon, algorithmic spamming is simply not going to pay off.

Giving anonymous people and organizations the chance to steal your attention all day, at scale, seems like a worse idea every day.