Agent Attrition
In order to effectively measure all the benchmarks related to a company’s success, employee attrition is important to measure. Call centers are notorious for their high turnover rates and there is an element of truth to it. While some agent attrition rate is to be expected and in fact, even welcomed, high agent attrition rate becomes a cause of concern for call centers due to the amount of time and resources it takes from the hiring stage, to recruiting, training and making an agent capable of handling queries on the floor.
High agent attrition can be due to a lot of factors including poor hiring process, too much workload, little benefits and lack of proper training.
How is it calculated?
There may be a number of reasons why agents leave the organization and contribute towards high attrition rates. In order to reduce attrition rates, one must be able to calculate them first. We follow the following steps to calculate agent turnover.
Step 1 – Define Turnover
The first step is to define what a turnover actually is. Turnover is a type of attrition and while attrition is simply employees leaving an organization, turnover is a little different. Turnover refers to a type of attrition in which employees who are left have to be replaced by new employees. Turnover is often costly and can be due to voluntary termination or involuntary.
Turover can be the turnover of only call center agents in the company, the turnover of agents belonging to a particular category i.e., call, live chat, support, email or technical support, pr a turnover which includes every employee working in an organization. Once it is defined, we are in a better position to calculate employee turnover.
Step 2 – What is considered as a Turnover
In order to calculate turnover, we have to identify the reason the employee turnover happened in the first place so as to determine if it will be included in the turnover.
For example, did the mployee leave the organization voluntarily which means they were seeking a better opportunity or were they terminated because of poor performance or failure to comply with the company’s guidelines? We also have to determine the department they belong to and their total time period with the organization.
Step 3 – Set Time-period & Monitor
Before measuring employee turnover, we have to set the target time period for which we have to calculate it like every month, quarterly, every 6 months or annually. After defining a turnover, filtering what we consider as as a turnover, setting the specific time period, we are now in a better position to calculate employee turnover rate.
Step 4 – Measurement
After all things considered, we can measure employee turn over rate with the following formula:
Number of leaving agents / Average number of agents = turnover rate
How it affects Project Goals?
The cost of agent attrition is more than what meets the eye. It’s not just about the salary, we lose an experienced worker, which took considerable time and effort to maintain while facing another challenge, which is customer satisfaction. We have to consider the time and resources it takes to hire an agent, take them onboard, agent training, and the time they will take to understand the nuances and complexities of handling a customer and to understand the rhythm of an organization.
Attrition drains resources requiring more labor and the learning process for new employees is longer, taking them considerable time to reach peak performance. It can also impact customer satisfaction and employee morale negatively, which are the two main pillars for a call center performance.
How it affects Benchmarks?
Replacing employees requires a lot of cost and on top of that, it also impacts key performance indicators and KPIs. While new agents may try their best, a lot of your benchmarks like Average Handle Time of a support session, Customer Satisfaction & Retention Ratio, Agents Response Time and Customer Issue Resolution Ratio would be negatively affected, causing a decrease in customer satisfaction ratings. Customer need agents that know your product inside out and it is hard while you are actively replacing your agents. Your new agents may not be as quick in resolving queries as your experienced agents were and it also prevents you from calculating benchmarks effectively.
How do we reduce Agent Attrition Rate?
Instead of accepting high attrition rates as the characteristics of call center, we have actively taken measures to reduce call center attrition rates by taking the following steps:
- The first step in ensuring low employee turnover is recruiting the right people in the first place. We have developed a comprehensive hiring and recruiting process which means only those employees are hired who are passionate for the job.
- Simplifying and automating processes can not only take the burden off of our employees but also help them handle repetitive tasks. It can allow them to focus on more product tasks like live calls and providing better support experience.
- Employee training is another important factor in employee attrition. We make sure we train our ChatPandas with soft skills training, effective communication and technological training. We also train them with the values and vision of your business as well as ours.
- We provide them with opportunities to grow and to succeed in their career, provide them with work flexibility and devise friendly policies to help them retain and grow.
- We use advanced technological tools to handle increasing customer demand, enable AI based routing which reduce work burden and improve productivity.
- We compensate them fairly with market competitive benefits to make it worth their while.
- We establish clear goals and objectives to measure and benchmark their performance so when they attain their objectives, they have a sense of achievement.
We have a culture of appreciation and rewarding high achieving employees so everyone is motivated to do better and they are encouraged to know that their work is being rewarded and appreciated.