7 Ways to Reduce Attrition in a Call Center

How to reduce attrition in call start can start by improving your Recruitment and Hiring Process as Contact center attrition has a significant impact on businesses. The average call center agent turnover was 35% in 2021 and 38% in 2022!  The cost alone is enormous, often exceeding thousands of dollars per lost agent. As customer care is a crucial part of any successful company, contact center agents form a vital but often fragile link in the business chain.

Several approaches on how to reduce attrition in a call center exist, but to improve your chances of success, it’s crucial to understand the underlying cause or causes of the problem.

Root Causes of Contact Center Attrition

Several studies have found that a lack of coaching and feedback are primary causes of contact center agent attrition. Other factors include, but are not limited to, low salaries, inflexible schedules, burnout from dealing with customer complaints and frustrations, and lack of positive communication between contact center agents and their supervisors.

A major hurdle in overcoming this problem is rooted in the fact that many business owners have come to regard a high contact center agent attrition rate as the norm, resigning themselves to the reality of employees coming and going. It takes a fresh perspective to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. The position of a contact center agent, as an essential part of any company, can and should be long-term, rewarding, and satisfying.

What, then, can you do as a company manager or business process outsourcing agent do to reduce contact center agent attrition? Following are the ways to reduce attrition in a call center:

#1. Improve Your Recruitment and Hiring Process 

The key to creating an outstanding call center is to put together a team of skilled and productive agents, which makes recruitment and hiring extremely important. In order to attract the best talent, it’s essential to advertise on various platforms. Since effective communication is crucial in call center roles, it’s important to focus on how candidates perform in interviews.

Develop questions that test candidates’ ability to think quickly, especially in situations involving difficult customer interactions. Consider including role-playing activities during interviews to effectively assess sales skills. Establish a set of criteria for evaluating applicants before interviews, ensuring a thorough evaluation process. This methodical approach ensures that the most qualified candidates are selected for your call center, laying the groundwork for operational excellence.

#2. Enhance Training Programs

Skimping on training sets new agents up for failure. If newly hired contact center agents feel a genuine effort is being made to equip them with the skills, knowledge, and experience needed for their job, they are more likely to be motivated to excel in their work and remain committed to it over a longer period.

However, no matter how extensive and thorough a training program is, it will be wasted on employees who are not a good fit for contact center work in the first place. Your HR team should work diligently to identify people with a good work ethic, a high ability to manage stressful environments, and positive communication skills that will enable them to become a vital part of your customer care team.

At ContactPoint 360, we focus heavily on the training aspect. We know that having tenured associates decreases your training costs, drives customer experience excellence and enables you to remain competitive with your pricing. Find out how we use technology to monitor agent productivity and use insights from speech analytics for training.

#3. Skill Development Programs

Some agents have natural talent when it comes to the skills necessary for providing quality customer care, while others need more direction. Learning programs that focus on enhancing communication skills and understanding the intricacies of how your company works, its policies, and its goals will go a long way toward keeping a contact center agent engaged and invested.

Quality assurance should focus on offering agents helpful, constructive feedback that will encourage them to improve in a positive, non-stressful, and non-critical way.

#4. Providing Excellent Software and Tools

Operating a contact center at less than its optimum capability due to a lack of the proper software and tools necessary for smooth, effective functioning is an unnecessary waste. The wise business owner will do well to provide top-notch tech support, upgrade software regularly, and ask for feedback from agents regarding how technical difficulties may impair their work. Broker price opinion (BPO) agents working with contact center staff may offer their recommendations as well.

#5. Customer Satisfaction Focused Monitoring

Often, a contact center agent’s work is evaluated according to impersonal metrics such as average call duration or the number of calls per hour. This approach hugely misses the mark when the true measure of a successful agent’s work is customer satisfaction.

Positive feedback from customers regarding a particular agent’s work is far more crucial than the number of calls said agent handles in an hour. When agents know that they are not under pressure to quickly end a call and move on to the next one, they can give their full attention to each customer. That results in investing the necessary time to resolve issues fully and fosters a positive relationship between customer and company.

#6. Train Supervisors to Coach

Contact Center supervisors should coach rather than criticize. Even after new agents have completed their training, they will benefit from continuous feedback to improve their work.

Typically, experts advise a 5:1 praise-to-criticism ratio—criticism, delivered in a polite, constructive, and non-confrontational way, will be more palatable when accompanied by a significant buffer of positive reinforcement.

Another essential aspect is encouraging collaboration and a supportive team spirit among the contact center agent staff–employees who know they can rely on one another will not feel isolated and lost when facing a problem.

Implementing these strategies in an organized, synergistic manner will almost certainly result in lowered contact center agent attrition, enhanced productivity, and a more positive work environment for BPO agents and their supervisors.

#7. Improve Work Conditions

Improving work conditions in your call center requires a two-pronged approach. First, make the physical office space more comfortable for your agents by adding things like plants or even consulting with an interior designer for bigger changes. The aim is to create a workspace that people enjoy being in. Second, focus on implementing worker-friendly policies that balance employee well-being with operational efficiency. For example, when scheduling agent shifts, include dedicated break times to prevent burnout.

Remember that a happy and content call center agent is a productive one, and neglecting their well-being can impact overall performance. By addressing both the physical environment and policies, you can ensure comprehensive improvement of working conditions in your call center.

Conclusion

In the end, to reduce attrition in a call center you need a complete way. Using certain methods can greatly increase how long workers stay, their work done and happiness with their jobs. By making the job process better, investing into learning materials, providing good tools and computer software, and focusing on individuals can help businesses build a happy workplace. For a call center team to be happy and motivated, it is important to provide good work conditions with lots of supervision focused on coaching. 

ContactPoint360 is a business outsourcing company that knows how to reduce attrition in a call center. We use technology to it’s greatest potential to watch over agents and learn from speech analysis to monitor an record data to make training better. By working with ContactPoint360, businesses can make their work easier, lower worker change and better serve to their customers.