Having a contact center is a great help for a business, even if yours is just a startup company. With it, you can handle more customer engagements. However, operating your contact center is not always a walk in the park.
One of the challenges that you will encounter here is contact center attrition. It can significantly affect the effectiveness of the center. So, you want to deal with this as early as possible. Let’s explore the strategies you can use to lessen this issue.
How Contact Attrition Impacts Your Startup Company
Simply put, contact center attrition is when an employee leaves their work or the company. There are several types of contact center attrition that you will encounter.
- Voluntary: The employee leaves on their own volition.
- Involuntary: When your startup company is the one who initiates the termination of the employee.
- Retirement: The employee has reached the mandatory age of retirement.
- Internal attrition: The employee moves to a different department.
Of the four types, retirement is the only one that you do not influence whatsoever. People will have to retire whether they still want to stay. On the other hand, you can have more control over the three, influencing the decision of employees to leave.
Aside from these types, you also have to consider demographic attrition. This is the rate at which a specific demographic group within your ranks is leaving. That is especially important if you want to maintain a more diverse team.
The Reasons Why Call Center Agents Leave
There are a variety of reasons why your contact center agents might depart. However, you can group these reasons into several broad categories. By understanding these broad categories, you can better determine what approach to use in dealing with attrition.
Misaligned Expectations
Every applicant has their expectations of the job they are applying for. And while you might seem to meet those expectations during the initial job period, it can change significantly over time. For instance, they might find the workload more than they expected.
Image from Vantage Circle.
Why these misalignments happen can often be due to you not fully informing these candidate agents. When screening hundreds of applicants, you might not have enough time to provide all of them with detailed information about the job. As such, they might come to think of it differently.
It is also worth noting that their expectations can change over time. For instance, they might have a different career goal after going through certain circumstances. When this happens, your startup company might not be able to continue providing for them.
Poor Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is also crucial for a better relationship with them. If you do not connect with your contact center agents, they would feel very distant. That feeling can ruin their work experience, causing them to leave.
Image from Recognize.
Lack of engagement from the management can be due to many things. For instance, you might not always have enough time to communicate with the different departments. That is particularly common within companies that operate on a remote model.
Poor Agent Selection
The kinds of agents that make up your contact center are vital for its success. Ideally, you want experts in handling the specific customer interactions you expect. But with the rush to cater to an ever-expanding customer base, you might be tempted to focus more on quantity.
That rush will result in a team not optimized for handling calls. Here, you increase both voluntary and involuntary attrition. People leave if they have difficulty keeping up with the work’s demands, while you can also end up letting go of others due to poor performance.
Determining The Right Attrition Rate
Regardless of the reasons, employee attrition will always be a part of running your startup company contact center. As such, your goal is to lower it to a more reasonable level. To determine the rate at which this is happening, you can use the following formula.
Contact center attrition rate=(Employees who left)/(Average number of employees)
As you can see, the employee number at any given point can vary. Thus, you need to calculate the attrition rate several times over an extended period. That will provide a picture of whether you can successfully retain people.
Ideal Attrition Rate
When calculating attrition rates, you might wonder what value you should strive for. That can vary a lot, depending on the circumstances. For instance, if your industry is highly competitive, you can expect higher rates. Nevertheless, studies showed that call centers experienced as much as a 30% attrition rate within the last few years.
This value will serve as your benchmark. However, you can set a further target for the startup company. Create that benchmark based on the trends your industry experiences and your current business needs.
How Your Startup Company Can Lessen Contact Center Attrition
Reducing contact center attrition rates requires a multifaceted approach. The first thing you want to deal with is convincing your agents to stay. Look into every aspect of the employee experience. Some of the critical areas you should dig deeper into include:
- Workload: Are your agents handling more customer support requests than they could deal with?
- Employee satisfaction: Are your agents satisfied with the salary and benefits they are getting?
- Agent effectiveness: What areas are your contact center agents have a hard time with?
- Work-life balance: Do your agents have enough time to pursue other stuff outside their work?
By looking closer at each of these areas, you can determine the reasons that might lead to agents deciding to quit. You can then determine the best strategies to convince them to stay. Note that each employee might require a more personal approach to convince them to stay.
Getting Help In Dealing With Contact Center Attrition
The other aspect you also need to explore is the effects of agent attrition. The most common issue you will have to deal with is not having enough agents as needed. That is an area where Virtua Solutions can help greatly.
Image from Time Doctor.
Through our assistance, you can quickly access an expert team of agents to fill the gap. Since you don’t have to deal with lengthy recruitment processes, you can quickly deploy our teams. We can also fully customize each agent team to suit your needs.
Getting Support For Startup Company Employee Engagement
That is not the only area that we can help you with. Virtua Solutions will also help you better reach out to your agents. Our virtual assistants can communicate with them and ensure you get feedback.
Additionally, we can help in delivering the necessary employee engagement. For instance, we can facilitate training sessions to help your agents resolve issues. Our team can even handle employee well-being programs for you.
Keep Employees Longer And Make Your Startup Company Contact Center Succeed
Contact center agent attrition will always be something you have to deal with. But with the right strategy, you can be confident that fewer people will leave your startup company. Contact us today and let us lend you a hand.