No matter what industry you are in, employee turnover is unavoidable.
While call center support service agents’ attrition has hit an all-time high, specific sectors are intrinsically more prone to high turnover.
The average annual turnover rate for agents in US contact centers is between 30 and 45%, according to the Quality Assurance & Training Connection (QATC), which is more than twice the national average for all occupations.
High employee churn is never beneficial for a company, mainly since onboarding new hires necessitates a significant time and resource commitment. During the first 90 days of employment, when new hires are most likely to feel overburdened by their tasks, according to Gartner, agent churn is highest. Additionally, depending on the agent’s experience and responsibilities, replacing them might run anywhere from $1,500 to a stunning $20,000.
Many ecommerce call center owners believe attrition is a necessary industry evil because of the extensive and varied list of factors that may contribute to growing agent turnover.
Why are the agents departing?
- non-demanding or monotonous employment
- not receiving praise for a job well done
- no room for advancement or development
- flexible workplace lacking
- Disinterest in the work or consumers
- excessive stress or pressure
- Managing sour phone calls
- Unhappy with one’s job
Why Agent Attrition Hurts Businesses?
Attrition affects your bottom line in more ways outside only the cost of hiring new call center support services.
Agents are essential for fostering excellent ecommerce call center experiences and raising satisfaction because they are the front line of your company’s call center support services and engagement strategy. With so many options available to consumers nowadays, a negative experience might cost you a client for life. Unfriendly live assistance is one of the main reasons customers choose to do business elsewhere, according to PwC.
“Happy customer service agents equal happy customersโand happy stockholders,” according to Forrester. Keeping your agents happy and productive is essential to your success since they perform better on the job, are more effective, and stay in their positions longer. This is one of the more expensive variables in managing customer service operations.
How to Keep Your Agent Engaged?
Businesses must reinvent the agent role as consumer expectations, and agent attrition rates rise. To decrease turnover and boost employee and customer happiness, we’ve outlined four strategies for keeping your agents interested.
1. Increase Interest in the Work
Most ecommerce call center employees’ time is often spent on the same menial, repetitive activities. Work like this can quickly become monotonous, unfulfilling, and demoralizing, which results in poor customer service.
Fortunately, businesses may relieve agents of the tedious job by automating routine queries and easy operations that don’t require much thought or effort. For more sophisticated customer issues that require a human touch, the right ecommerce call center chatbot can even automate actions in addition to responses, freeing up employees to concentrate on those.
2. Better Tools for Your Agents
Customer care chatbots can prepare agents for talks with customers and automate repetitive chores.
For instance, if a client has recently received an overage charge on their mobile phone bill, the appropriate customer care chatbot can gather this information, along with any other pertinent context, and feed it on to the agent, so they are prepared when the conversation starts. This helps speed up resolution and prevents the client from having to explain themselves (again), providing for a less frustrating and more gratifying experience.
According to PwC, “unknowledgeable agents” are another factor that could cause clients to do business elsewhere; thus, investing in a solution that gives agents access to information in short- and long-term makes sense.
3. Give the Agents Time to Schedule It
Employees, including agents, feel more empowered and take control of their work when they can regulate their schedules.
Customers can make appointments or reserve meetings with an agent in advance using a customer service chatbot. This reduces frustration and time for the consumer. Additionally, the chatbot gives the agent control over the interaction and their time.
Agents can provide customer support on their terms and at their own pace by capturing context and automatically scheduling time in the agent’s calendar in line with their availability.
4. Allow Agents to Participate in the Larger Strategy
The people who know your clients and business the best is your call center support services. However, they are frequently disregarded or underutilized. Leveraging your agents’ experience and knowledge can make them feel more valued. It is also a wise financial decision, mainly if you modify your support model to keep up with shifting consumer wants and expectations.
When developing automated content for their customer service chatbot, we always advise our clients to involve their support staff because we’ve assisted several of them in constructing some of the first automated customer experience (ACX) teams in history.
Agents are at the front lines of the ecommerce call centers. They are in the best possible position to identify the most common questions and the best procedures, responses, and content to address those demands.
Similarly, skilled agents may play a crucial role in creating automated experiences, from creating the content to overseeing the chatbot.
5. Give the Agents a Goal
Agents working in call center support services frequently need to be allowed to observe how their actions affect the people they serve or the bottom line of the business. Depending on the channel a customer selects, agents might still need to get a chance to interact with them to learn how their service affected their day or slightly simplified their lives.
Allowing agents to have face-to-face video chats with consumers can benefit both sides. Giving a voice and a face to an otherwise anonymous request enables customer service representatives to engage with clients more personally. Customers benefit because they have a more human experience due to this.
You could provide statistics about how customer service has affected the company’s sales or specific case studies about customers’ experiences and interactions with the business. Make sure the staff members know the value of their work and how it affects both the clients they serve and the business’s bottom line. This knowledge can serve as a powerful motivator.
Agents working in contact centers should be aware of their impact on clients. This is a tremendous missed opportunity for contact centers, one that has a significant impact on how agents approach CX since only 25.6% of firms “ensure workers grasp the broad picture, the direction of the business, and how they plan to get there,” according to NTT’s 2020 Benchmark Report. Agents must understand the significance of their positions, how those responsibilities contribute to the overall strategy, and the bigger picture of the organization’s goals to deliver good CX.
Final Thoughts
The agent experience must be noticed as the call center support services market transitions from a human-first to an automation-first approach.
Keeping agents motivated and content is advantageous to your consumers and your long-term business. Additionally, enhancing the agent experience lowers attrition and raises CSAT, loyalty, and customer satisfactionโall of which benefit your bottom line.ย
If you’re having trouble providing your consumers with 24/7 service that is satisfactory. Now is the right time to outsource your eCommerce call center needs. We at Vserve is given every interaction individualized care, and we make sure that your consumers are happy with our speedy turnaround.
