It's Time To Reduce Agent Attrition In Your Contact Centers

Transcript

Hey guys, this is Blair from BravaTrak.

I've been thinking about agent attrition. It's been amongst the top three challenges for contact centres for several years. Yet, I'm wondering if we now accept high agent attrition as the norm, and consequently missing an opportunity.

I've spoken with a surprising number of contact centre managers who've told me that if they can get 18 months out of an agent, they're happy. Honestly, I can't think of any other type of business unit that would regard that as acceptable.

Now, I get that working as a CSR in a contact centre is viewed as an entry position into larger organisations. People want to move on, and they want to move up.

Yet, the counterpoint is that many agents move from contact centre to contact centre. They are definitely moving on, but not moving up.

What if you could take the average agent tenure from 18 months to 24 months? What would that do to your recruitment and training costs? What would that do for your customers - being helped by more experienced agents?

Of course, your agents work in one of the most challenging service environments, and it's become even more challenging because of COVID. They do repetitive tasks, they deal with demanding customers, and they suffer from social isolation with work from home.

Their motivation declines, and it's even worse for Millennials and Gen Z, the largest percentage of your agents and the least resilient.

This, frankly, is a challenge of leadership.

Yet, across multiple contact centres, team leaders aren't successful at driving high engagement. And that's reflected in the unplanned leave challenges and the historically lower employee engagement levels faced by contact centres.

There is a better way.

By implementing the right systems, it's possible to grow employee engagement to world-class levels, and reap the increased performance, reduced unplanned leave and lower agent attrition resulting from that.

I know because I've helped multiple contact centre clients do just that.

I wonder if the first challenge is simply overcoming our acceptance of short agent tenure as being the norm we can't do much about.

That's my take. What do you think?