The Two Biggest Factors That Influence Employee Turnover
Employee turnover is inevitable. Just like returned products and bad reviews, your company must find a way to deal with the constant churn of employees coming and going.
In the customer service industry, and particularly within call centers, this is an exceptionally tough challenge. In fact, average employee turnover in call centers was as high as 30% in 2017.
So in order to maintain a team of 10 agents, you’d need to continually hire and train three new agents every twelve months. And if your associated costs follow industry averages, you're looking at an $18,000–20,000 hit each year. You’d practically be in the business of training call center agents!
Which of course, you're not.
And yet, that is the scenario that many business owners and managers such as yourself face.
So What Can You Do?
As a business leader, one of your primary responsibilities is to understand and motivate the team you are responsible for. Recognizing what drives employees to be loyal and work hard will provide a GPS in your journey to reduce employee turnover.
The two biggest factors in motivating employees are fair pay and fair treatment, according to a 540 person survey conducted by Clutch. Both can be segmented down to provide more digestible ideas you may find useful for your own organization.
Fair Pay
Competitive Pay
This probably won’t come as a surprise, but some employers, more so than employees, think that other incentives, like ping pong tables or a feel-good company mission, can serve as adequate substitutes for competitive pay. Those things can certainly help, but from the eyes of an employee, the number on their paycheck is the biggest indication of how much they are valued.
Are your agents being valued just as much as other agents in other call centers?
You can compare the salaries your agents are receiving to industry averages on websites such as Glassdoor.com. If the pay at similar work places in the area are higher, any agents you bring on have a higher chance of jumping ship should the opportunity arise.
Providing competitive wages can be a challenge, so it might be helpful to calculate how much an employee leaving costs you. This would include productivity lost, recruiting/hiring cost, and training time, among other things. (If you’re ready to tackle this problem at a deeper level, here's a great article that sheds more light on the nuances of the situation.) Seeing the actual cost your company incurs by an employee leaving might provide the needed justification to improve the pay structure for your call center.
If cost is still an issue, consider partnering with an outsourcing company such as ourselves. Most customer service outsourcing companies will be able to provide the coverage you're seeking, but at a much lower cost.
Regular Pay Increases
Everyone is familiar with the carrot and stick analogy. In most situations the carrot, or incentive, will produce better results. Pay increases are a great way to incentivize agents to stay longer than they were planning to.
For example, in order to lower the number of agents that leave as soon as training is over, it's common practice to provide slightly lower pay during training, and then increase it to the normal rate once the agent has gone through the training period.
Having predictable pay increases, such as those awarded for increasing skill sets, will likewise incentivize agents to stay longer. Also, if an agent were to receive an increase in pay after taking on additional responsibilities, not only are they motivated to stick around until that happens, but you’ll also be creating a higher skilled workforce. For positions that experience particularly high turnover, you could introduce pay increases dependent on how long an agent has been in that position. Senior agents will be more likely to stay (and once again, you’ll have a higher skilled, more experienced team), and junior agents will view that as an added incentive to stay for at least as long as it takes to receive those pay milestones.
Rewards and Bonuses
Expanding on the carrot approach, rewards and bonuses not directly tied to an agent’s salary are huge motivational factors.
If your company has quarterly or yearly bonuses, is your customer support department included in them? If not, this can be detrimental to an agent’s morale—especially a more senior agent that has stronger ties to your company. They’ll interpret this as the company considering them as having low value.
It’s fair to argue that bonuses for agents aren’t practical because of how short their tenure is. In that case, perhaps it’s time to find ways to increase that tenure and provide bonuses to agents that have been with the company for a certain number of months/years. Or, have a separate performance based bonus specifically for the call center.
By offering these bonuses and incentives, you’ll have a much more loyal customer service team.
Fair Treatment
Company Culture
Outside of the home, people spend the most time at the workplace. Because of this, workplace culture will be one of the biggest influences on an agent's decision to stay or leave. No one wants to stay in a toxic environment for an extended period of time. On that same token, everyone wants to find a group where they feel like they belong.
All companies will have an internal mission statement or set of values. When a new agent arrives on their first day, will those values be immediately apparent, or will they be in for a surprise when they come across those values in the company handbook? When the entire company, top to bottom, lives and breathes its purported company values, all employees—call center agents included—will experience noticeably less workplace stress.
And less workplace stress directly translates to higher morale, longer employee tenure, and lower turnover.
Adequate Training
There aren't many things more frustrating or demoralizing than asking someone to do a job, with little to no explanation on how to do it. Of course, the ability to adapt is an extremely valuable skill for a customer service agent to have. But, without proper tools, training, or the necessary information, it may feel like they're asked to do the impossible.
Not only does it increase the likelihood that the agent will look for opportunities elsewhere, but the customer on the other end of the exchange will walk away with a subpar experience.
On the other hand, accomplishing a task or fulfilling a responsibility can be an extremely rewarding experience in and of itself. With the proper training and resources, you're giving your agents the opportunity to experience this on a daily basis.
Even after the initial training is done, there should be ongoing training to make sure that each agent is up to date on their skills and knowledge.
It’s also good practice to check in on agents regularly. Not in any sort of intrusive way, but because you are genuinely interested in any challenges or concerns they may have.
Opportunities for Growth
By recognizing that most of your agents have different long-term aspirations beyond the call center, you may be able to come up with other ways to create an environment where they are willing to stay a little longer.
Many times the call center agent demographic is made up of students pursuing a higher education. If workforce management is able to provide flexible schedules (while maintaining service levels, of course), you'll be creating an ideal situation for many students.
Or perhaps, if your company regularly brings in keynote speakers, or puts on training for other employees, consider including call center agents as well. If agents are able to participate more in these educational opportunities provided by the company, they'll feel much more valued and a part of the team. And as a result, some of them may even decide to stay with the company for the long haul and work on advancing through the ranks. Which is arguably the best way to lose an agent.
Employee Turnover Is Part Of (Call Center) Life
The ideal scenario for business owners would be to find and hire agents that would never leave. In other words—robots. Unfortunately, until AI can flawlessly emulate human emotion, spontaneity, and adaptability, that option is most likely off the table.
If we're being brutally honest with ourselves, we need to recognize that call center positions are rarely, if ever, the last stop on someone's career path. More often than not, this will be the first, or second, full-time job for many of your agents.
So it's really just a matter of when an agent will leave to pursue other opportunities. But what you can do is extend their end date as far away from their start date as possible, and encourage and guide them to be as productive as possible during that time.
At the end of the day, the best thing you can do for them (and your customers!) is to create an environment where they feel valued.
As mentioned earlier in this article, if the cost of operating an in-house customer support team is too much, we’d love to partner with you. You’ll get a professionally managed team that can adapt to your ever-changing customer support needs. AND all the headaches that come with employee turnover will be handled on our end. To get in contact with us, click here.
