3 Ways to Reduce Contact Center Attrition

In surveys conducted over the past 3 years, industry consultant Strategic Contact has found that contact center attrition continues to be the top challenge for contact centers. Turn-over is a reality. But when attrition gains momentum—often through absenteeism—it can quickly spiral out of control. Even a moderate amount of attrition has a significant impact as it raises the costs of recruiting, hiring, training. And most importantly, it can negatively affect the quality of the care and service your center provides.

To combat contact center attrition and keep employees engaged, start by focusing on these three imperatives:

• Strategic hiring and training

An average of 72% of contact center costs is staffing, and who you hire matters. There are the cost issues of training new employees, not only for job performance and success but for longevity within your organization. Capturing successful employee characteristics is critical to optimize hiring practices and find more people who are a good fit.  Personalizing recruitment and training programs can lead to a happier workforce and improved customer interactions.

• Coaching and development

Of course, every call center has both as core functions of their organization, but are you fully utilizing them to help fight attrition? Think about how task leaders spend their time. Are you planning for and allocating enough time for leaders to coach and develop employees—and holding them accountable? Because taking people off the phones or other channels may not be feasible at certain times, make sure you’re scheduling at the right time and that you’re able to adjust and reschedule as workloads change.

• Find new ways to engage your employees

A weekly paycheck is no longer enough to hold onto your best employees. Now more than ever it’s critical to find new ways to keep them engaged. Some of those ways are very simple: Ask what’s important to them and listen to feedback. When you empower employees and give them a voice, they can become capable decision-makers in customer interactions, not only doers. You’ll also boost morale by demonstrating that roles are valued, and goals are achievable.

Take the next best step in your contact center

View a Genesys on-demand webinar with Lori Bocklund from Strategic Contact. In it, she discusses how and why attrition is still such an issue, and the practical steps you can take to get a handle on it. In the webinar she shares survey findings from the new report Contact Center Challenges & Priorities for 2018, including how to:

• Save on your overall training budget by improving long-term planning and hiring optimization.

• Create an employee “role blueprint” to correlate employee skills and knowledge with business metrics. These include sales, customer satisfaction, service level and contact center metrics, and many other types of data.

• Eliminate manual steps and reduce the time it takes to assess, analyze, coach and train employees.

You’ll also hear how analytics and tools can help you convert low performers into high achievers by pinpointing individual skill gaps and developing customized training plans.

Watch Conquering Attrition in the Contact Center: 3 Imperatives to Engage & Keep Employees and walk through the details of this critical workforce engagement topic.