How to help contact center agents avoid burnout

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Is burnout gripping your contact center?

A worldwide survey of contact center agents revealed 59 percent are at risk of burnout, including 28 percent who face a severe burnout risk.

Burnout is defined by the American Psychological Association as "physical, emotional, or mental exhaustion accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance, and negative attitudes towards oneself and others."

That spells trouble for contact centers. Agent burnout can lead to:

• Poor customer service

• Chronic absenteeism

• Turnover

The survey investigated what factors made agents more at risk of burning out, and what factors made them more resilient. Agents with the lowest risk of burnout tend to be:

1. Empowered to serve customers

2. Compensated fairly

3. Supported by their boss

The survey examined 15 factors and found a total of 11 were tied to lower burnout risk.

Get the full report.

Burnout study overview

A total of 951 contact center agents participated between January and February 2023. The responses were anonymous. Agents from multiple countries and companies participated.

Participants were first asked to complete a burnout self-assessment provided by MindTools. The assessment generated a burnout risk score on a scale of 15-75:

• 15-32 = Little to no risk of burnout

• 33-49 = At risk of burnout

• 50-75 = Severe risk of burnout

Next, participants were asked 15 questions about their work environment. The topics ranged from the training they received to whether they had a good friend at work.

Of the 15 factors, 11 were correlated with a lower burnout risk.

This was determined by a 10 or more percentage point gap between agents with no burnout risk compared to agents with a severe risk of burnout.

There was some good news.

While 59 percent of agents surveyed were in the at risk or severe risk category, there is some improvement from a similar report from 2016. That study found 74 percent of contact center agents were at risk of burnout.

This post highlights the top three factors that make agents more resilient to burnout. You can download the complete study here.

Top three ways to prevent agent burnout

Having a customer-focused organization is table stakes.

A whopping 94 percent of agents who were not at risk of burnout felt their organization was customer-focused, compared to just 80 percent of severe risk agents.

But becoming customer-focused is a long journey. In my experience, it takes an average of two years. You can get there by following The Service Culture Handbook, and I think you should, but here are three things you can do right now.

1. Empower your agents

Agents at low-risk of burnout are much more likely to feel empowered than agents facing a severe burnout risk.

Empowerment is a process of enabling agents to do good work. It involves giving agents:

• Adequate resources to help customers

• Best practice procedures to be more consistent

• Authority to deviate from normal procedures when it makes sense

I've created a collection of employee empowerment resources to help you empower your team.

2. Pay your agents well

You've probably heard a disgruntled employee say, "They don't pay me enough to deal with this." Okay, you've probably said it at least once or twice yourself.

It turns out that adequate pay helps make agents more resilient.

This isn't too surprising.

Daniel Pink's groundbreaking book on motivation, Drive, revealed employees are generally motivated by three things:

1. Autonomy (see empowerment, above)

2. Mastery

3. Purpose (i.e. working for a customer-focused organization)

There’s a huge caveat to all this research. You have to pay people enough that they don't worry about pay. For most companies, this means above the mid-line.

Zeyenp Ton's excellent book, The Good Jobs Strategy, profiles customer-focused companies like Trader Joe's and Costco. These companies pay their employees well above market, despite having very low prices.

How can this possibly work? Three simple reasons:

1. Access to better talent. The best employees can earn more.

2. Improved results. Better employees, by definition, can do more.

3. Decreased turnover. People are less likely to leave a good job when they're well-paid.

Making the case for giving employees is all above math. Don't worry, I don't enjoy math either, so I wrote this guide to help you make your case.

3. Support your team

Agents who felt they had a supportive boss are much less likely to be at risk of burnout.

A supportive boss makes employees feel like they can succeed. They bring out the best in people, and help their team reach new levels of mastery in their role.

Supportive actions include coaching, encouragement, and even accountability.

Wait, accountability?!

Yep. Accountability isn’t punishment. Holding someone accountable really means giving them responsibility. (Employees like that.)

I won't lie to you. Being a supportive leader is tough. I mean, who’s got your back? Managers often feel stuck between demanding executives and (seemingly) needy employees.

It doesn’t have to be that way, so I've put together a collection of resources to help you get started.

Get the report

Discover 11 factors that make agents more resilient to burnout.

Download

Conclusion

Employees like working for customer-focused companies with great products, especially if they are empowered, paid well, and have a good boss.

You knew that already. Now you have some real data to back it up.

One surprise was about remote agents. People who primarily work from home aren't any more or less resilient to burnout than agents who work primarily onsite.

Strangely, remote agents were more likely to get regular feedback from their boss.

You can download the full report to read even more insights. And if you suspect burnout is a challenge for your contact center, drop me a line and let's talk.

Reduce average handle time with this one simple trick

Average handle time, or AHT, is an important metric in contact centers.

It measures the average length of a call. Many contact center leaders track AHT closely because shaving even a few seconds off the average call could allow the contact center to handle more volume without adding staff.

A Customer Service Tip of the Week subscriber recently wrote to ask my advice on reducing AHT in his contact center. I shared one simple trick that can produce immediate results.

It's a trick that I discovered more than 20 years ago while running experiments on AHT reduction. The results initially surprised me, but the more I looked at them, the more it all made sense.

The AHT Experiment

We started by gathering a sample of 20 contact center agents. The agents represented multiple shifts (we operated 24/7) and multiple performance levels.

For two weeks, the agents participated in a series of experiments to see if we could find a way to reduce AHT. One of those experiments revealed an unexpected solution.

Agents were asked to forget about AHT entirely. Instead, agents were asked to focus on the needs of each caller, one caller at a time. This meant that some callers needed extra assistance, and that was okay. Other callers were in a hurry, so it was okay to speed things up.

Two things happened at the end of the experiment

1. Variability increased. The length of individual calls varied more widely than before.

2. AHT decreased. The average length of calls went down.

One agent, Bev, surprised me the most. She was an otherwise great agent whose customers loved her, but Bev always struggled to meet the AHT standard.

Even Bev's AHT improved!

How did we lower AHT?

I spent time debriefing with agents and discovered a counterintuitive insight. The AHT goal itself was the root cause of higher AHT!

That's because agents tend to view an AHT goal as a target, not an average.

On long calls, agents would get anxious when the call time approached the AHT standard. This anxiety eroded listening skills and caused agents to become less friendly. Those issues made it more difficult to guide customers through issues that naturally required more time.

On short calls, agents became too relaxed. If a call was wrapping up well short of the AHT standard, agents would take their time. This made the call go longer than it needed to be, which drove up their average.

Agent stopped doing all that during the experiment.

That's why the calls became much more variable. Agents would spend the time they needed to guide a customer through a difficult issue. They would focus on quickly helping a customer if the customer had a simple issue or was in a hurry.

Now, here's the weird thing. I later ran similar experiments with contact centers that didn't hold their agents to an AHT goal, but did share the AHT stats with agents.

The same issue occurred there, even without the goal. Agents looked at the average as a target.

How to decrease AHT today

The secret to lowering AHT today is to ask your agents to stop thinking about AHT. Remove it from their scorecard and get rid of any reports or displays that remind them of an AHT target.

Instead, ask your agents to focus on helping each customer as efficiently as possible.

You don't have to take my word for it. Try running the experiment yourself and note what happens. You can even separate your contact center into two teams, a test and a control group, so you can compare the results of your own experiment.

Additional Resources

Here are a few additional resources that can help you reduce AHT even more.

1. Three ways to effortlessly cut AHT

2. Improve your call control skills (Myra Golden interview)

3. How first contact resolution improves AHT

Is scoreless quality assurance right for your contact center?

"Nope."

The contact center agent shook his head as he scanned the quality assurance form. We had just sat down to review a call, and it wasn't going well.

"Nope," he said again.

The call had been fairly good overall, but that's not what he focused on. The agent was fixated on the score. Specifically, the points he didn't receive.

He scanned the report while tuning out my feedback, saying "Nope" anytime he saw a score he disagreed with. It was a frustrating conversation.

In retrospect, it's hard to blame him.

He knew his performance was ultimately judged by the score, and the scores were a bit arbitrary. Why was one behavior worth six points while another one was worth four? I didn't do myself any favors by just setting the score sheet down in front of him at the start of the conversation.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered a way to give clear, unvarnished feedback without agents getting defensive about the score.

The solution? Eliminate the score.

What is contact center quality assurance?

I realize some readers might not be familiar with the quality assurance process in contact centers. Here's a brief overview.

You've probably heard that disclaimer at the start of the call, "This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes." Many contact centers record customer phone calls and this disclaimer is often required for legal reasons. They also capture emails, chat sessions, social media responses, and other customer communication.

In a typical contact center, a checklist is used to evaluate a sample of each agent’s recorded contacts as part of the QA process.

The checklist contains a series of required actions or behaviors used to evaluate each interaction. Many of these checklists also assign points for each behavior, and the points are tallied to give agents a total score.

QA can be an important part of agents' job evaluations.

Why quality assurance scores are a problem

"Well, that's friendly for me."

The agent clearly wasn't friendly on the call. Her monotone voice sounded bored, perhaps even a little put-off by her customer's reasonable request.

But "friendly" was worth 10 points on the quality assurance (QA) form, so the agent was arguing. The discussion had devolved into a debate about points rather than how to project more friendliness on the next call.

This often happens when we attach an arbitrary score to an employee's review. The score becomes the focal point and the intended behaviors get pushed aside. Any loss of points can feel like a slap.

The worst part for a supervisor is the scores are hard to defend.

• What exactly is friendliness?

• What does 10 points worth of friendliness sound like compared to five?

• Can you still be friendly if you sound like a grumpy robot?

Inevitably, score-based QA takes the focus away from constructive feedback and turns review sessions into arguments about points.

What is scoreless QA?

Scoreless QA is a quality assurance process that focuses on behaviors rather than points. For many contact centers, the transition can be as easy as eliminating the scores from your existing process.

For example, let's say an agent is required to verify a customer's identity before discussing private account information. When you review a call, the agent either correctly verified the customer's identity or they didn't.

It's the behaviors that count, but points often get in the way.

Jeremy Hyde, Director of Customer Service at Sun Country Airlines, explained the benefit of removing the points. "The idea behind no score is avoiding the argument of 'that call was a 93, not a 92!' rather than focusing on feedback."

Eliminating the points makes it easier to focus the conversation on helping the agent do a better job the next time.

"We use scoreless QA sheets but still track areas of focus and quality expectations," said Kristine Berken, a customer loyalty team lead at Cellcom. "We find reps react more positively to this method as it creates less anxiety or 'big brother' feelings."

How to create a metric without a score

The biggest objection to scoreless QA comes from supervisors who want a clear metric to evaluate agent performance and to track overall trends. Here's where scoreless QA really shines.

Let's say you monitor five calls for a particular customer service agent. The agent provides the correct answer to all customer questions on just three out of five calls.

You now have a tangible, actionable metric!

1. Goal performance: provide the correct answer 100% of the time.

2. Actual performance: provided the correct answer 60% of the time.

3. Gap: improve accuracy by 40 percentage points.

Removing the score shifts the conversation from earning more points to "How do you ensure you give correct information on your next call?" (By the way, this blog post can give you some ideas as to why reps give out the wrong information.)

The goal of the QA discussion should be helping the agent identify expected behaviors for the next contact and agree to try them.

Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience and Support at Number Barn, offered this three-step process on his Customer Service Life blog for giving behavior-based feedback:

1. Start by discussing what worked.

2. Now discuss areas for improvement.

3. Wrap-up by discussing goals for future calls.

You can also identify macro-trends across your contact center without QA scores.

Perhaps you identify "prevent future calls" as an area for improvement. A roll-up of your QA results for the month shows that agents are doing this 82 percent of the time.

You can then drill down and try to find the root cause.

• What issues tend to drive future calls?

• Do agents know how to recognize these issues and prevent them?

• Are there particular types of issues agents fail to prevent?

Conclusion

You can immediately improve the quality of feedback you share with your agents by getting rid of arbitrary scores. This reduces noise and focuses the conversation on what matters—improving calls.

Contact center agent satisfaction remains high after a rough year

This past year has been tough on contact center agents.

The pandemic shifted more agents to working at home. Those who were at home already likely had their lives disrupted in some other way.

Some contact centers endured unimaginable spikes in volume. Others saw their businesses dry up and were forced to lay people off.

A report from Benchmark Portal found that agent satisfaction has remained fairly high. This post examines a few of the positive trends along with some areas for concern that must be addressed.

About the Benchmark Portal Agent Voices Report

The report is based on a detailed survey that was given to more than 10,000 contact center agents and leads in North America. The survey was conducted in 2020.

The survey consisted of questions grouped into 15 categories, ranging from overall satisfaction to leadership, training, and culture.

Benchmark Portal's last Agent Voices Report was released in 2015. The new report compares the current results to the results in the previous report.

The full, 64-page report is available for purchase from Benchmark Portal.

Bright spots for contact center agents

Agents gave their contact centers high marks in several categories. Here are five that really stood out.

Overall satisfaction

You might expect a steep drop in agent satisfaction, but it was only 3 percent lower than in 2015. Most agents were satisfied with their job and hoped to still be working for the same company in two years.

One result that really stood out was company pride. 83.78 percent of agents agreed or strongly agreed with this statement:

I am proud to say I work for this company.

Vision

This was another category of questions that surprised, with the results remaining virtually unchanged from 2015. 

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know I often write about the importance of having a clear customer service vision. So I was happy to see that 78.44 percent of agents agreed or strongly agreed with this statement:

The organization's vision is clearly communicated and understood by employees.

Leadership

A crisis can often galvanize our faith in leadership. This appeared to be the case in 2020, where the overall leadership score increased by 5.3 percent from the 2015 survey.

One question that's important is whether or not agents perceive that senior leaders value the contact center. Here, 81.04 percent of agents agreed or strongly agreed with this statement:

Leadership recognizes the importance of the contact center.

Teamwork

The people you work with every day have an enormous impact on how you feel about your job, your company, and your ability to get things done. Many employees will work through other job-related challenges if they like and trust the people on their team.

This was another strong category in 2020, showing a 4.6 percent increase from 2015. One question really stood out, with 92.04 percent agreeing or strongly agreeing with this statement:

There is a real sense of community within my team.

Direct Supervisor

The one person who likely has the biggest impact on your job satisfaction and performance is your direct supervisor. The results for this category were virtually the same as in 2015, but there was one big eye-opener.

Posting a 7.4 percent gain from 2015, a total of 87.44 percent of agents agreed or strongly agreed with this statement:

I have a good working relationship with my manager.

Opportunities to improve contact centers

The Agent Voices report highlighted several areas where contact centers need to improve agent satisfaction. Unfortunately, these have all been challenges for many years.

Career Growth and Compensation

This category had a steep 17.7 percent drop from 2015 to 2020. This shouldn't be too surprising, given the high number of layoffs in 2020, but companies now need to rebuild trust with the employees who stay.

Compensation is a particular issue, with just 62.11 percent of agents agreeing or strongly agreeing with this statement:

My compensation is comparable to, or better than, other similar jobs in the community.

Voice of Customer

The overall results for this category were relatively unchanged from 2015, and a high number of agents acknowledge their contact center collects customer feedback.

Agents don't feel as though their ideas are heard enough, however, with just 65.94 percent agreeing or strongly agreeing with this statement:

If I have an idea for improving customer service, I know I will be heard.

Recognition, Value, and Appreciation

Many contact centers rely on games, contests, pizza parties, and other frivolity to recognize agents. Logistically, that's more difficult if agents are working from home. 

Practically, what agents really want is to know they are making a difference. Only 62.11 percent agreed or strongly agreed with this statement:

I've seen improvements take place as a result of feedback I have given.

Communication

This category continues the theme of agents feeling they are part of something, rather than just a cog in the machine. The results were fairly low in 2015, and they decreased 2.6 percent in 2020.

One problem is when agents feel blind-sided by a change. Just 62.38 percent agreed or strongly agreed with this statement:

Changes that affect our customers are communicated to us before they affect the customer.

Take Action

The Benchmark Portal Agent Voices Report indicates contact centers are doing a lot of things well, particularly in the areas of vision, leadership, teamwork, and the direct supervisor.

The biggest area for improvement is making sure agents feel they matter.

You can accomplish this, and tap into a wealth of information, through regular conversations.

• One-on-one conversations to review performance.

• Share customer feedback with the team and discuss ways to improve.

• Conduct stay interviews to find out why agents remain with the company.

• Get feedback from agents when making major decisions.

• Update agents on critical changes before customers learn about them.

Finally, consider investing in the full, 64-page report.

It provides extensive insights from 15 categories of questions, along with analysis and recommendations for improvement.

How to Balance Service and Cost in the Contact Center

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

There's a constant tension between staffing and cost.

In contact centers, having too few people means customers have to wait too long for someone to answer the phone, start a chat session, or reply to an email. On the flip side, staffing too many agents can waste money.

There has to be a middle ground.

I interviewed Brad Cleveland, customer experience consultant and author of Contact Center Management on Fast Forward, to get his take on contact center staffing and discover some solutions to this challenge.

Brad Cleveland, Author of Contact Center Management on Fast Forward

Cleveland shared some unexpected insights, such as how keeping customers on hold can increase costs. Many customers will simultaneously contact a company via other channels such as chat, email, and social media when they're waiting on hold for a long time. 

I've been guilty of doing this myself. I call it a channel race and the idea is to see which channel solves my problem first.

The challenge from the company's perspective is each of those contacts engages a different agent, which increases costs. It also makes it more difficult to keep track of a customer's story when they're using multiple channels at once.

Here are a few more topics Cleveland discussed in our interview:

• Why companies should make it easier to get a live person on the phone.

• How to save money by reducing wait times.

• How to use existing staffing levels more effectively.

• When cross-training can hurt productivity.

• Why it's essential to forecast for non-phone channels.

Here's the full 21 minute interview.

I also highly recommend Cleveland's book, Contact Center Management on Fast Forward. It's an essential guide for anyone leading a contact center. You can find it on Amazon.

Quickly Fix Agent Performance on the Cheap

Contact center leaders are constantly trying to improve agent performance.

Some solutions are costly. Others are time consuming. Still others require support or expertise that's not readily available.

There are some solutions that are easy. You just need to know where to look.

I reached out to 11 contact center leaders and asked them to share a favorite technique they've used to improve agent performance in some way. The only caveat was the idea had to be implemented with very little time, money, and resources.

Here's what they shared.

Brad Cleveland. Author, speaker, consultant, Brad Cleveland Company, LLC. Twitter: @bradcleveland

Explain the “why” behind schedule adherence, the importance of being “in the right place at the right times.” The relationship between staff and service level is not linear – it’s exponential. Every person has a significant positive impact on wait times—a ripple effect far beyond the contacts they directly handle.

---

Greg Collins. Chief Customer Office, SalesLoft. Twitter: @greg_p_collins

Highlight an Agent for great service at your next team meeting, presenting them a funny trophy for their desk (think old bowling trophy from Goodwill). When presenting for the first time, establish the expectation that this is a weekly award, to be pasted by the current recipient to another team member in each subsequent team meeting.

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Nate Brown. Director of Customer Experience, UL EHS Sustainability. Blog: Customer Centric Support. Twitter: @CustomerIsFirst

Top-down training is great, but there is a special magic that takes place when leadership, coaches, and agents are unified using a wonderful resource such as The Effortless Experience and dreaming about how to design a better Customer Experience.  While we’ve most recently utilized a “book club” format, our learning together has also taken the form of DiSC, Strengths Finder, and many more. 

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Jeremy Watkin. Director of Customer Experience, FCR. Blog: Customer Service Life. Twitter: @jtwatkin

Regular, short one on one meetings with agents are useful for a couple reasons. First, they keep your connection with team members strong and are a terrific forum for investing in their continued personal and professional growth. Second, they are a great opportunity to quickly review job performance and regularly set and discuss goals and expectations.

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Jenny Dempsey. Social Media and Customer Experience Manager, NumberBarn. Blog: Customer Service Life. Twitter: @jennysuedempsey

When you give CSRs the opportunity to show gratitude in ways other than just “thanks for calling”, it opens the doors to building unique relationships with your customers. It costs under $100 to create and set up a station in your office with thank you cards, markers, stickers, crayons, stamps and allow your agents to connect with customers on a whole new level.

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Todd Hixson. Director of Workforce Management, VIPdesk Connect. Twitter: @Huskerhix

Schedule adherence is not meant to be perfection, rather trying to maximize opportunity to help customers. Going to break a few minutes early is better than trying to go exactly on time and getting caught on a call. Make a “break window” for your team that is 50% of your AHT helps ensure best chance at best capacity.

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Mathew Patterson. Customer Service Evangelist, Help Scout. Twitter: @mrpatto

I struggled to get the team to consistently do a ‘review’ task that was important but never urgent. I had an engineer spend 15 minutes on a live ‘leaderboard’ that showed who had and had not done their weekly reviews. Making the tasks more visible and very mildly competitive was enough to change the behavior of the team almost immediately.

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Jeremy Hyde. Customer Care Manager and Vendor Oversight, UCare. Twitter: @JeremyHyde_

I believe in finding ways to lead by example. Walk the talk. Example, if you are looking to improve the quality of your customer experiences find a way to demonstrate what that looks and sounds like. I’ve done this by having my team listen to and audit my calls or listen in on escalations that I took over.

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Jacob Shields. Call Center Manager, CCI Systems. Twitter: @jacobshields20

Team leads listening to live calls while they work on other tasks. This allows them to pick-up on the tone of a call before it may become a concern or escalation. This allows them to coach an agent live, follow-up with them afterward on improvements, or let them know of their outstanding job!

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Beth Gauthier-Jenkin. Vice President, Customer Care, Gopher Sport. Twitter: @GauthierBeth

Ensure people understand the Purpose, Process, and Payoff of missed performance standards. Learning improves when people understand why they are asked to do something (purpose). Performance improves when we show them how to do it (process). If we can demonstrate how strong performance serves customers and supports their individual success, motivation increases because they see value (payoff).

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David Perry. Customer Support Manager, Clio — Legal Practice Management. Twitter: @davidjp87

Empowered agents are engaged ones. We encourage our staff to seek out opportunities beyond their day jobs that help them grow. However, they must nail their day-jobs first and foremost. They are driven to maintain high standards of productivity, because they are rewarded with work that will develop them further. This drives performance and grows the organization.

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Additional Resources

Download the Quick Fix Checklist to diagnose many common challenges.

You can find even more tips to quickly fix agent performance with this training video on LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com.

You'll need either a LinkedIn Premium subscription or a Lynda account to view the full course. Here's a 30-day trial to Lynda if you don't already have one.

Report: Most Contact Center Agents At Risk of Burnout

We've all seen the signs.

A contact center agent starts developing some bad habits. You can hear a negative tone of voice. Absenteeism increases. Productivity declines while errors go up. You may even see an alarming lack of caring.

The agent's spark has been extinguished. Your agent seems to be burned out.

You're not alone if you've seen this happen. A new study conducted by Toister Performance Solutions reveals that 74 percent of contact center agents are at risk of burnout. 

A whopping 30 percent of agents face a severe burnout risk. 

Burnout Problems

The U.S. National Library of Medicine provides this definition:

Burnout is a psychological term that refers to long-term exhaustion and diminished interest in work.

According to their website, symptoms include:

• Emotional exhaustion

• Alienation from job-related activities

• Reduced performance

These are all potentially harmful issues. Emotional exhaustion can make it difficult to project friendliness and caring to customers. Alienation from job-related activities might mean an agent gives less effort and rarely goes the extra mile. The result of all that is reduced performance.

You may even seen a spike in absenteeism when an agent begins to burn out before they finally leave. Or worse, they stay, but as a shell of their former selves.

Study Results Revealed

The study results are now available in a new research report. Here are a few highlights:

• 52% of agents who are at severe risk of burnout said their company is not customer-focused.

• 41% of agents who are at severe risk of burnout said they don't feel empowered.

• 36% of agents with a severe burnout risk think their co-workers don't provide outstanding service.

Ten Ways to Fix Contact Center Turnover

Attrition is the biggest contact center challenge in 2016.

That's according to this research from Strategic Contact that outlined the top contact center challenges for 2016 . You could probably change the year and the result would be the same. High turnover is always a problem in contact centers.

This post outlines ten proven ways to improve contact center attrition rates. But first, check here to run your turnover numbers and see if you really have a problem. 

You should know the answer to three questions:

• How much does turnover cost?

• What's your annual bad turnover rate?

• What's a reasonable target rate for bad turnover?

These numbers will tell you how much your contact center can gain from improving turnover. They're probably the first thing your CEO or CFO will look at if you want to invest in fixing this problem.

1. Conduct Stay Interviews

Don't wait until your best agents give notice. 

Schedule stay interviews with your top employees. Consider conducting stay interviews with a cross-section of other employees too. These are interviews designed to find out what keeps your employees from leaving. (Here's a great overview from Inc. Magazine.)

The goal is to learn exactly what factors prompt these agents to stick around so you can keep doing those things. You also want to learn what might cause them to leave.

2. Raise Wages

A client of mine was notoriously tight fisted when it came to employee wages. He quickly changed his mind when I showed him this chart:

It showed the $12 per hour average wage he was paying his contact center agents was at the bottom end of the pay scale compared to the range for similar jobs in the area. Paying at the bottom of the pay scale created two problems:

• His company couldn't attract talented employees at that wage.

• Any talented employees he developed quickly left for an easy raise.

In my client's case, raising wages to $14 per hour quickly paid for itself in three ways:

• He recruited better employees who needed less training.

• He recruited better employees who were more productive.

• Employees stayed longer because they were more satisfied with their pay.

3. Hire For Culture Fit

Let's face it - not every person will love working for your contact center.

The trick is finding, and hiring, the people who will. This might be a problem if you tend to lose a lot of agents within their first six months. 

One tool that can help you do this is called an Ideal Candidate Profile. This describes both the skills and cultural attributes that an employee must have to fit in with your contact center.

You can use this worksheet to create your own Ideal Candidate Profile.

4. Improve Training

Great hiring won't help you keep employees if they don't get sufficient training. Poor training programs can create turnover in a number of ways:

• Agents never get the confidence to do their jobs correctly.

• Agents never get the skills to do their jobs correctly.

• The training is so bad that agents quit before finishing.

Many contact centers can reduce their new hire training time by 20 - 50 percent while getting better results if they simply adopted more modern techniques.

Toister Performance Solutions helps clients design new hire training programs, but you can also make many improvements on your own. The starting point is setting good learning objectives.

You can also read my article, 5 Ways to Train Contact Center Agents Faster.

5. Create Career Ladders

Many contact center agents don't view their job as a career.

It's often seen as a stepping stone to something else, or perhaps a good way to earn some money for a short period of time.

A career ladder is a defined path that spells out ways for employees to grow within your organization. For example, many contact centers have different agent tiers. A new agent can earn progressive responsibility and pay by getting promoted into higher tiers.

In other companies, agents are actively recruited into other departments. 

Whatever the case may be in your organization, creating opportunities for your agents may entice your most talented people to stay longer.

6. Identify Toxic Leaders

Take a close look at your turnover rate by leader. Are agents quitting certain leaders or teams at a much faster rate than others?

An abnormally high turnover rate could signal a toxic leadership style. That individual leader may benefit from additional coaching or training. Or, they might not be cut out to lead people in your company.

The flip side is also helpful. Take time to study leaders whose agents rarely leave or frequently get promoted and see if you can identify what they do differently.

7. Focus on Short Commutes

The length of your employees' commutes might have an impact on how long they stay.

This fascinating post suggests that 30 minutes is the maximum time contact center employees are willing to commute. The post also cited research showing that employees with a commute of 10 minutes or less are 20 percent more likely to stay with your contact center six months or longer.

There seems to be a little more tolerance for longer commutes if employees are taking public transportation.

This data suggests that contact centers should employ a hyper-local recruiting strategy, embrace more work at home options, or both. 

8. Empower Your Agents

ICMI released a study last year revealing that 86 percent of contact centers don't fully empower their agents.

Empowerment is closely connected to attrition. One of the things agents consistently say they dislike about their jobs is the inability to do what's necessary to help their customers.

Employee empowerment isn't easy, but you can use this guide to get started.

9. Stop Demotivating Agents

Contact center leaders have focused on motivating their agents for as long as I can remember. 

They try incentives, slogans, and snazzy banners. Gamification is the latest agent motivation fad. None of it seems to really work.

That's because agents don't have a motivation problem. The issue is demotivation. Agents become steadily demotivated the longer they're on the job.

Take a look at this data from Benchmark Portal:

Good agents fundamentally want to help people. Make it easy for them to do that, and they're more likely to stay. Make it hard for them to help customers, and they'll probably quit.

Here's some more compelling data about why agents don't need to be motivated.

10. Do A Real Engagement Assessment

Many contact centers do an annual employee engagement survey. 

Contact centers do these surveys because they understand the link between employee engagement and retention. Unfortunately, most of those surveys are a waste of time. 

The way these surveys are designed, they rarely lead to actionable changes that can take a meaningful bite out of agent attrition.

I've had success with a counter-intuitive approach that doesn't rely on employee opinion. It instead takes a hard look at the underlying processes that drive engagement.

One client used this assessment to cut their turnover by 50 percent and save $150,000.

You can do the conversation starter assessment yourself. Or, let's talk about a more comprehensive version.

What About Culture?

You might be wondering why I didn't suggest improving your contact center's culture.

The trick with culture is it's a pretty squishy concept. However, if you look carefully at my recommendations, you'll see that they all contribute to a strong culture.

In other words, follow these suggestions and you'll be on your way towards building the type of culture that attracts and retains talented agents.

New Report: Contact Centers Fall Short on Surveys

Contact centers struggle to use customer service survey data.

That's the conclusion suggested by a new report from ICMI called Collapse of the Cost Center: Driving Contact Center Profitability. The report, sponsored by Zendesk, focuses on ways that contact centers can add value to their organizations. 

Collecting customer feedback is one way contact centers can add value. This feedback can be used to retain customers, improve customer satisfaction, identify product defects, and increase sales.

So, what's the struggle? Here's a statistic that immediately caught my attention:

63% of contact centers do not have a formal voice of the customer program.

Yikes! It's hard to use your contact center as a strategic listening post if you aren't listening.

Let's take a look at some of the report's findings along with some solutions.

Key Survey Stats

Here are some selected statistics from the report.

First, let's look at the types of surveys used by contact centers that do have a formal voice of the customer (VOC) program:

Source: ICMI

Customer Effort Score (CES) presents an untapped opportunity. 

CES measures customers' perceived effort (see this overview). A good CES program will help companies identify things that annoy customers and create waste. This makes it a great metric for improving efficiency.

Why is efficiency so important in a customer-focused world? Here's another statistic from the ICMI report that explains it:

62% of organizations view their contact center as a cost center.

That means efficiency is one of the most important success indicators for those companies' executives. CES marries cost control and service quality by measuring efficiency from the customer's point of view.

Another revealing statistic shows what's not measured:

44% of contact centers don't measure customer retention

Keeping customers should be the name of the game for contact centers. If you don't measure this statistic, than customer retention can't be a priority.

Challenges With Surveys

The report highlighted challenges contact centers face with survey data. Here are the top five:

Challenge #1: Using survey data to improve service. Survey data is more than just a score. The key is analyzing the data to get actionable insight. That's a skill that many customer service leaders don't have. One resource is this step-by-step guide to analyzing survey data.

Challenge #2: Getting a decent response rate. Response rate is a misleading statistic. There are two things that are far more important. First, does your survey fairly represent your customer base? Second, is your survey yielding actionable data? Your response rate is irrelevant if you can confidently say "Yes" to these questions.

Challenge #3: Analyzing data. See challenge #1. You can't improve service if you don't analyze your data to determine what needs to be improved.

Challenge #4: Designing effective surveys. Survey design is another skill that many customer service leaders don't have. Here's a training video on lynda.com that provides everything you need to get started. You'll need a lynda.com account to take the full course, but you can get a 10-day trial here.

Challenge #5: Taking action to help dissatisfied customers. You'll need a closed loop survey to tackle this challenge. A closed loop survey allows customers to opt in for a follow-up contact. Once you add this, it becomes very easy to initiate a program to follow-up with upset customers.

Additional Resources

The full report provides a lot more data and advice on leveraging contact centers to improve customer service and profits. It's available for purchase on the ICMI website.

Here are some additional blog posts that can also help:

• Anatomy of a Lousy Survey
• 5 Signs Your Customer Service Survey is Missing the Point
• Why You Should Stop Trying to Improve Your Survey Scores

New Report: Contact Center Leaders Don’t Get Engagement

Happy agents lead to happy customers.

This pithy saying is a widely held belief among contact center leaders. The logic flows that if you engage your contact center agents, they’ll deliver outstanding service.

A new report from ICMI reveals a severe disconnect between this belief and what contact center leaders are actually doing.

The data suggests that most contact center leaders don’t get engagement.

This post examines the disconnect, uncovers some root causes, and makes a few suggestions for correcting the problem.

The Big Disconnect

It’s hard to find any disagreement that it’s important for contact center agents to be engaged. Here are two findings from ICMI’s study:

• 99% of respondents believe that agent engagement drives performance
• 88.8% believe that agent engagement is a priority in their organization

Now, here’s where the disconnect begins. Only 7 percent of contact center leaders said that agent engagement was a top priority. 

The disconnect is further revealed by what contact centers measure. Here are the top five agent metrics in contact centers today:

1. Quality - 74%
2. Average Handle Time - 73%
3. Customer Satisfaction - 58%
4. Adherence to Schedule - 58%
5. First Contact Resolution - 43%

These metrics suggest that compliance and efficiency are the true priorities in today’s contact centers.

Justin Robbins, ICMI’s Senior Analyst, shared with me that only 19 percent of contact centers measure agent engagement.

Root Causes

A lack of clarity makes engagement hard to manage.

Many reports, like ICMI’s, omit a definition. The assumption is the term is clear so it doesn’t need to be defined.

Unfortunately, there’s a lack of consensus. There’s even disagreement among the top employee engagement consulting firms, like Gallup and BlessingWhite.

Here’s the definition I prefer:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

This definition helps identify some additional root causes.

Engaged agents want to serve their customers at the highest level. Unfortunately, many contact centers make this difficult.

• Agents aren’t empowered to deliver outstanding service
• Agents don’t receive the right kind of feedback
• Agents aren’t given the tools and systems they need.

The ICMI report also looked at what would motivate contact centers to invest in giving agents better tools to serve their customers. Unsurprisingly, the top choice was cost.

Engagement Solutions

These issues always come down to dollars and cents.

That’s why employee engagement initiatives fail. They’re reduced to surveys on touchy-feely subjects like morale.

You’ll need to make a stronger business case if you really want to engage your agents.

Start by going back to the definition of employee engagement. There’s no soft stuff here. This is all about results:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

Next, get out your calculator and add up the cost of making it hard for agents to do a great job. Here are just a few options to consider:

• What’s the real cost of agent turnover?
• How much could we save by improving first contact resolution?
• Could we reduce customer churn through better service? If so, how much?

There’s real savings here. 

Even a 10 percent reduction in turnover, repeat contacts, or customer churn could add up quickly. Measure those items and you’ll be much more likely to find the budget you need to improve agent engagement.