Reducing agent turnover

The first tutorial, Reducing agent turnover - Part 1, gave an overview about the impacts of turnover on cost, customer satisfaction and employee morale. In this first tutorial, we provided five action steps to address turnover. In Part 2, we provide a checklist of approaches for reducing turnover. Use this list as a guide to prepare your turnover reduction strategy.

Step 1 - Identify root causes

Before you can really fix turnover, you will need to understand the root causes of why people are leaving your call center. The first tutorial in this series provides guidelines for identifying root causes. Review the steps from Part 1 and make a list of the root causes for attrition in your center.

Step 2 - Evaluate strategies to reduce turnover

Below is a checklist of strategies for reducing agent turnover. You will want to make sure and answer:

Prosci's Agent Turnover Reduction Checklist

	1. Improve recruiting processes by clearly defining CSR job profiles. Benchmarking findings indicate that the top CSR competencies looked for during hiring are: customer service skills and experience, including an ability to work well with the public and an ability to adopt a customer perspective technical skills, including proficiency with computers and support systems strong verbal communication skills, including good voice quality, diction, and articulation
	2. Re-evaluate the hiring process. Test applicant aptitude for call center activities and stress level. By identifying individuals that are naturally adaptable to a customer service center, you'll prevent CSR attrition due to incompatibility with the job. Ask yourself, "are we consistently hiring people with the right skills and attributes for call center work?"
	3. Provide job applicants with an understanding about a typical workday, making sure that applicants have a clear idea of what will be expected of them (consider having applicants sit with agents during a tour of the call center).
	4. Provide career pathing. Explain the opportunities for promotions or lateral moves that will become available to agents once they have performed CSR duties for a certain amount of time.
	5. Offer a competitive salary and benefits package. Verify that your salary scale is competitive with other call centers in the area and with other call centers in the industry.
	6. Offer an improved benefits package that meets CSR needs. For example: flexible schedules telecommuting / work-from-home arrangements paid holidays paid vacation reimbursement for job-related courses on-site day care health and dental coverage on-site accommodations for reducing stress, such as a break room with music
	7. Provide the tools required to help agents improve their performance, such as reference material, feedback, mentoring, coaching, and ongoing training. An effective and balanced quality monitoring program is essential to retain the best employees. Make sure that CSRs have the support and resources to be successful and perform their job well.
	8. Identify at what points agents are most likely to leave (e.g., right after graduating, after 2 months, 6 months, ...) and plan to provide extra support and coaching at that time.
	9. Base promotions and rewards on clearly-defined criteria. Make sure that CSRs are not rewarded based on favoritism or 'unspoken' requirements. Address inequities in the workplace and make sure that management is responsive to CSR concerns. Make the workplace fair to all CSRs and provide ways for CSRs to bring up issues without being penalized by management.
	10. Improve training to provide agents with a solid foundation when beginning their position. Explain call-handling guidelines completely before requiring trainees to take calls. Provide ample phone practice to increase comfort level. Create mentoring relationships between experienced agents and new graduates.
	11. Empower your agents and reward them frequently for their successes. Positive reinforcement can go a long way toward building employee loyalty. Make sure that comments are sincere and based on true achievements; insincere comments will do more damage than none at all.
	12. Identify and address causes of CSR stress: Exit interviews - these can be conducted either immediately after a CSR gives notice, or after a specified time period has passed. Exit interviews are an excellent way to get honest feedback about job issues because former employees can be completely forthright without fear of reprisal. Employee satisfaction surveys - these assist companies in learning about agent issues and concerns. If done anonymously, they can provide insights about management, policies or conditions that are biased or need improvement. CSR focus groups - these increase involvement and ensure that CSRs can contribute their perspective to decisions and issues that affect their jobs. It also creates open lines of communication, rather than one-way directives.
	13. Manage any change that affects agents carefully. Poor change management can cause resentment on the part of CSRs if they are kept uninformed and have to deal with the complications associated with a change. For example, if a product is released and announced without informing CSRs, they have to deal first-hand with customer questions. Possible change disasters can include the surprise introduction of a new product or service, unannounced marketing campaigns, office moves or organizational changes.
	14. Implement organizational change so that agents have the right coaching and support structure to support their work.
	15. Do not constantly shift decision-making or job role boundaries without establishing a clear business need.
	16. Communicate openly and include CSRs in decision-making.
	17. Provide clearly-defined job parameters, policies, and expectations - don't expect CSRs to be successful without clear direction and reinforcement.
	18. Implement a structured retention plan that: identifies causes of agent attrition develops action steps to address these causes tracks the effectiveness of changes
	19. Increase training effectiveness. Increased time in training or improved training effectiveness will correlate with: more informed agents, better customer service, faster handle times, less supervision, and greater employee satisfaction.
	20. Track the effectiveness of different recruiting sources and techniques. For example, if applicants hired through employee referrals have a 10% improved retention, then focus more resources on encouraging employee referrals, rather than placing standard newspaper advertisements.

Step 3 - Create an action plan and implement that plan

Many strategies fail to take hold because of poor planning or weak execution of the plan. Create detailed action steps for recruiting, hiring, training and coaching. Track the results, resolve issues and measure the change in agent turnover over time. Make the results visible to others including call center managers. Recognize those changes and reward those people that are contributing to these results.

Reducing agent turnover - Part 2

Step 1 - Identify root causes

Step 2 - Evaluate strategies to reduce turnover

Prosci's Agent Turnover Reduction Checklist

Step 3 - Create an action plan and implement that plan

Other resources:

Call center bookstore and reference library