Imagine the business without the folks of talented employees, it’s a hard bet you can wager!
Imagine the scenario of handling stressed and angry customers without an experienced agent.
You ultimately lose leads worth a billion dollars without having talented employees.
And losing such a bet shouldn’t be an option in your business!
Thereby, it is important to focus on reducing agent attrition from the organization.
In fact, agent attrition has a nasty impact on call centers or any nature of the business.
In the context of call center infrastructure, the cost of losing one call center agent is pretty high.
When employees walk out, businesses have to spend time and money to replace them with new trainees. With such comprehensive work, this can drive down efficiency and profit margins.
But how do you reduce employee turnover?
This is where this blog comes into the picture. I’m going to talk about call center attrition, along with causes and high risks, and how it affects your business.
Afterwards, we will dive deeper into the 10 brilliant tips you can follow to reduce attrition rates at your call center.
Key Points of Discussion:
- What is Call Center Attrition?
- What Causes Call Center Attrition?
- In What Ways High Attrition Rates Can Affect Your Call Center?
- 10 Brilliant Helpful Tips To Reduce Agent Attrition in Call Centers!
What is Call Center Attrition?
Call center attrition abbreviates to call center employees (generally agents) leaving the firm.
There can be a number of reasons to boycott the organization and switch to the new one.
The point of the talk is if your call center has a high number of agent attrition, surely it is bad – can subrogate current employees and impact the whole organization.
Managers should take primitive measures to handle attrition rates at a certain level to neutralize the problem.
But before that, you must use this equation to find out the attrition rate of your call center or contact center.
After perplexing the notion, your next step should be to analyze the area of attrition/cause.
What Causes Call Center Attrition?
As we said earlier, there might be multiple reasons to disown the organization. Here are some of the main reasons pin-point behind staff attrition in call centers or contact premises.
At a glance, Poorer Organizational Culture is generally seen as a primitive cause behind call center agent attrition. Building a strong team culture and mutual bonds can help teams feel less isolated.
Unfair and Lower-The-Bottom Subjective Treatment may also be another reason behind agent migration. For instance, wave a low review score in the face of agents and deny an increment or promotion.
At last, No Empowerment alludes to the agent attrition at a precedent rate. Not providing adequate resources to help callers, agents can feel helpless and unempowered.
These are some points where the agent stops expecting more from the company and decides to quit.
In What Ways High Attrition Rates Can Affect Your Call Center?
The high attrition rate is like a black widow for your organization that silently cracks and develops gaps b/w organization goals and employer productivity.
A high attrition rate in your call center can lead to:
- High Recruitment and Training Costs
- Reduced Customer Service Quality
- Difficulty in Implementing New Technologies
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Cross-selling Issues
- Lead Them to Realising Overwhelmed and Unmotivated i.e. Lower Team Morale
In all of this, the company suffers a lot, and each department’s operations throttle disputedly.
That is why lower agent attrition is a key to attain company growth and build long-term relationships with clients.
Also Read: Ways to improve call center agent productivity and performance
10 Simple Tips to Reduce Attrition in Your Call Center
With these non-fail tips, your organization can easily reduce attrition and can pervade the gaps that have been created to shuttle call center objectives.
1) Hire The Right People
Lowering the staff attrition rate starts with recruiting the right candidates for the right position. This helps the organization in hiring potential and self-committed employees for relevant work responsibilities.
The best way to optimize hiring and recruiting sessions is by creating an ideal persona for call center agents, reckoning for job requirements, business values, and culture.
2) Enrich Training Process
Unlike any other industry employees, call center agents require contingent training to perform better and deal conveniently with the customers.
If the manager skips the training period or shortens the training session, he/she is omitting the areas of improvement for trainees and this would result in feelings of exclusion, inadequacy towards the organization.
3) Encourage Open Communication
Clear and open communication leads to better and thoughtful ideas in exchange. Asking call center agents for feedback on your systems and processes actually puts the agents in the position to interact with your seniors and helps them to know each other better.
Ask them which aspects they’re delighted with and what they think needs improvement.
4) Develop Friendly Team Culture
Most call centers think that call center culture resembles the team working together to achieve objectives. However, it is just a myth!
Simply put, the more call center agents feel isolated, the higher the chances of attrition. You can definitely prevent this by developing a friendly team culture that imparts a clear channel for employees’ communication, how they can work together, and how training happens in your call center.
5) Recognize Top Performers
Appreciating an employee’s good work is equivalent to regular feedback in preventing agent turnover.
When the manager notices the performance of the agent going beyond to serve customers, it is his duty to make sure they’re appreciated in front of the entire team. This excitingly makes performers feel encouraged to put more effort into keeping the customer happy next time.
6) Provide Long Term Career Plan For Employees
The interviewer often asks the interviewee, “Where do you see yourself after five years?”. The phrase actually prompts the future aspect of learning.
And the same goes for call center agents. If agents fail to see their future at your call center, surely this results in high agent attrition. This happens because of pared-down development opportunities. If you show them promises and consider training them to help become a supervisor, it can pretty much lower the attrition rates.
7) Enhance Recognition and Rewards Programs
The organization culture alludes to R&R (Recognition and Rewards) program, the stronger and perceptible the culture the higher the notion of excellence productivity.
The manager should go beyond the bar to ensure they receive appreciation of what they have done and receive rewards when they meet key milestones or performance metrics. Tip it all, try to implement peer recognition and reward programs.
8) Pass On Autonomy Over Customer Interactions
You never know your agent’s sparkles and inner genius. To bottom down the rates of agents attrition, let them take ownership of customer interactions.
Additionally, set the guidelines for interactions but let your agents use their perpetual thinking and creativity to help callers find solutions. In this way, your agent will be more focused on serving new customers with passion and topical energy.
9) Leverage Trending Technology
Implementing right tools at the right time and right approach can proximate your organisation to capture new leads and improve agents’ interaction with customers.
Leverage new technology for your call center, if needed, train your agents, guide where they face problems. You may use tools like Proper VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) software that can help call center agents handle callers more efficiently.
10) Interrogate Exit Interviews
Most organisations hold exit interviews to track and get familiar with the situation of an agent’s walkout. Instead of figuring out what went wrong, ask and deep dive into the case and offer agreeable solutions to block agent attrition.
Conducting an exit interview is helpful in generating positive attributes in your organization. Here are simple tips to organize exit interviews in an efficient manner.
- Drive an effective interview format
- Choose right interviewer
- Decide what to ask
- Decide what not to ask
Also Read: Tips to Reduce Hold Time in Your Call Center
In The End
It’s not only about agents but if you maneuver them you would certainly be at loss. Keep the focus on agent satisfaction, keep introducing new methods to sustain agents’ motivation at par.
Consider this blog and understand the steps to reduce attrition rates at a call center. Need any help? Visit Girnar Care and get professional help from reputed call center agents.
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