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Many contact centers are facing challenges with their turnover rates — in fact, the number of open contact center positions has doubled since 2020. High turnover puts significant strain on remaining agents, since they're saddled with more of the workload. This not only diminishes the quality of your call center's customer service — it also can harm morale and cause a snowball effect that leads to losing more employees.
Today, preventing turnover is a critical piece of any call center's operations. To do so, managers must ensure that they've built a culture that supports employees, rewards them when they succeed, and provides opportunities for advancement. This includes creating a strong performance bonus structure, developing a career path for each employee, and encouraging honest and open communication.
Giving fair and unbiased feedback is another major key to retaining employees. If your team feels their work isn't being fairly assessed or that management is playing favorites, they're likely to hop on Indeed and start shopping around. To scale contact center coaching and ensure every receives meaningful feedback, leading contact centers use conversion intelligence technology.
Keep reading to learn our top tips for retaining top talent and creating a call center culture where every agent's contribution is valued.
Today's employees are quick to hop to new jobs when they see better opportunities, especially in a high-demand field like contact centers. If they don't like working for you, they won't hesitate to leave. Providing competitive performance bonuses is a critical part of motivating agents and keeping them engaged with your company.
Take a look at your current performance bonus structure. Would you be excited about it if you were an employee? How does it measure up to industry standards? Do your rewards seem enticing enough to motivate your agents to go above and beyond for your customers? If you find that your bonuses are lacking, it may be time to experiment with some new programs.
Even inventions as fool-proof as the wheel get subtle upgrades from time to time. The same practice applies to performance incentives. The rewards that were enticing last year can seem like old news if you never spice things up. It's time to think outside the box and provide fresh incentives that will revitalize your workforce.
There's no better place to start than by gathering first-hand feedback from your employees. What rewards would they like to see you offer? Do they want a few summer Fridays? Or, would extra vacation time or cash bonuses be the ticket to more motivation?
In an age where many contact center agents work from home, you should also make sure you're giving your employees all the equipment they need to be successful. A great perk that some companies are adopting is a cash stipend for each employee to build their home office. You could also offer a monthly stipend to help your employees pay for their home internet, or for a gym membership — a healthy employee is a happy employee, after all.
There's no quicker way to lose an employee than sticking them in a dead-end job. Who wants to do the same old thing for years with no chance of progression? Thankfully, you can fix that by establishing a clear growth path. When you set a track for agents that incentivizes company loyalty and long-term employment, then you can maximize your chances of retaining the best talent.
During the onboarding process, inform new hires about a career path where promotions and raises can be expected after certain milestones are achieved. For example, all agents start with a competitive hourly rate. Then, after closing on X amount of sales, they become eligible for promotion. Making a clear, defined path to rewards incentivizes excellent performance and is a great motivator for agents of all experience levels.
Communication is key for any healthy relationship, and work relationships are no exception. By giving your employees a chance to speak up and share their honest feedback, you'll be able to address their concerns before they get out of hand. This doesn't just help your agents feel respected, but they will also appreciate the empathetic, open leadership approach.
Normalize a culture of open communication where your agents can leave constructive feedback anytime. Lead by example and show that it's okay to ask questions and use mistakes as teachable moments. By allowing constructive, non-punitive feedback in daily conversations, meetings, or employee surveys, you can foster a work culture that is focused on reaping the fruits of the learning process.
Manually reviewing calls is incredibly time-consuming and most contact centers review less than 2% of their calls. When QA is performed by people manually listening to calls, the process is also prone to bias and mistakes. Here's how Invoca's automated QA capabilities help contact centers achieve the best results possible.
Invoca's AI evaluates 100% of calls — not just a few isolated samples. With its conversation intelligence platform, you can automatically score every call based on custom criteria that help you work toward your KPIs. This helps QA managers get the most accurate representation of every agent's performance.
Agents also don't have to worry about a small selection of their calls becoming an unfair representation of their overall performance. Also, there is no QA person to blame or one "bad day" that ruins an agent's appraisal, but instead, the entirety of their performance is fairly evaluated.
A great contact center starts with consistent and effective agent coaching. In a large contact center, agents can feel like they are just a number in a massive pool of employees. But solutions like Invoca allow managers to directly "@mention" agents in call scorecards to give real-time guidance and support. Being on the same platform makes it easier to keep track of feedback and respond to constructive suggestions, too.
With Invoca's call scoring, you can give each agent access to their own scorecards and they can view them as soon as a call ends. The scorecards provide a simple, visual representation of their performance for self-coaching and reflection. High performers can take pride in their work and share what works with others, while lower-performing agents can find out how they can improve.
You can also use leaderboards to give public praise to high-performing agents. Give incentives for top performers to provide a friendly competition for achieving more conversions, shorter call handling times, or perfect call scores. Since these scores are unbiased, every agent can rest assured that their hard work will pay off.
MoneySolver is a national financial services company based in Jacksonville, Florida that helps people and businesses transform their student loan, tax, business, and credit situations. MoneySolver has about 100 sales agents in total — with such a large team, giving each agent meaningful feedback about their performance was a challenge. To solve this problem, MoneySolver uses Invoca to automatically QA agent performance on every call. As a result, they doubled their close rates at the contact center.
“Invoca has been a game-changer for us. Our agents can see exactly where they’re falling off the talk track and get instant feedback on how they can improve,” said Mark Roblez, Director of Call Center Operations at MoneySolver. “It’s helped us to double our close rate at the contact center.”
In addition to improving bottom-line metrics, Invoca also created a culture shift at MoneySolver that increased employee retention. Because employees knew their work was being fairly judged, they were more receptive to feedback and more eager to meet with managers to learn how they could improve.
“Invoca has helped keep our contact center agents engaged. I recently got a call on my cell phone from a 13-year employee, who wanted to know how she could get more 100% scores and move up on the leaderboard,” said Roblez. “With Invoca, I was able to quickly pinpoint a question she was forgetting to ask and help her to improve. It’s amazing that Invoca can help me quickly find coaching opportunities for even my most experienced team members.”
Read the full MoneySolver case study here
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