Tips to Improve Call Center Associate Turnover

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items to take back to your contact center. I think we got that for you today to improve the overall quality, improve your agent experience, hopefully improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. Expivia is a 500-600 seat call center outsourcer located here in Chile, snowy Northwestern Pennsylvania. Happy Groundhog Day. As I record this, today is literally Groundhog Day, a little Pennsylvania tradition down in Punxsutawney. I guess we got six more weeks of winter coming, which if you look out my window and this oncoming storm that's hit in the northeast, I kind of agree with this with the little guy.

01:56All right. Let's get right into it. Turnover in your call center, right? It's the number one killer of contact centers. It's the battle that all of us fight, no matter what our culture is, no matter how great it is. There's levels of it, right? So it can be good, bad, or awful, right? but it's something that's never just really totally fine unless you have a really small team of 10 agents that have been there together forever. But if you're talking anywhere more than 50, 100, 200 plus, you know, turnover can be a huge issue and a huge cost factor to everything that you're doing. So I wanna go over some of the things that I have seen to help with turnover. Some of the things that I'm doing in my call center, some of it is probably pretty obvious. Others may not be. So hopefully this kind of helps you guys navigate and think through some of the strategies in your contact center.

02:55So I have one, two, three, four, five. Five different, I guess, topics that I know affect turnover. And let's talk about number one. And it's the elephant in the room in a lot of contact centers and it's pay. It's base rate, not commission, but base rate. So, in many contact centers, especially BPO contact centers, or outsourcers, we're trying to make margin off of each associate, the pay has been awful. [pricing remark omitted] That's just the nature of the beast. We're seeing where inflation is in the country right now, how everything has gone up. There's a lot of things that start right there. I know a lot of you guys say, all right, well, our base rate's low, but we offer commission. Sometimes that can be very frustrating for associates, especially if if they're not hitting it.

04:11So it almost can sometimes lead to more turnover, right? If you have these goals that some are not able to hit that they know they won't be able to hit so they get frustrated and they leave. So that's something to kind of look at too is instead of maybe raising commissions which I know people really feel good about, right? Because you can kind of justify a better job or more sales or better handle time to correlate to a salary. it also can frustrate your rep. So look at just raising that base rate up and maybe lowering some of the goals or lowering what you would offer from a commission standpoint. You guys know I love our theory on our attendance policy and our attendance multiplier where we do not tag it to any type of work that the rep does, right? It's not on their quality.

05:03It's just strictly on their attendance. Now I'm not gonna go deep into it. We've done a full podcast on our attendance multiplier But basically, every week that an employee works their entire schedule, their base rate for the next week gets bumped. And if they call off, if they're not there, then they don't lose anything because they always have that base rate, but they'll go back down to their base rate and we'll try to build up their streak again. [pricing remark omitted] that's something that's worked for us pretty well. We've tweaked it here and there, but that's something, again, check that episode out. I think that can really, it opened a lot of eyes. I get a lot of questions on it.

05:48Pretty interesting. But again, you guys, you gotta look at your pay. [pricing remark omitted] You're not gonna be able to keep people really at that number, because they're gonna be constantly looking for something else. Number two is something that a lot of us don't think about, but it's the processes that we're actually utilizing or that the reps have to go through. Painful jobs turn over more. Easy jobs turn over less, right? And I'm not talking about like, you know, the brain numbing job of maybe in a factory where you're just literally, you know, pushing and pulling all day long, right? I'm talking more of the ease of use of systems, of being able to, you know, very easily move from one screen to the next, to have all the information that you need on one or two screens. If you see that your associates are struggling, right, to go between screens, to look at different windows, to have to go to four to five to six different systems to do their job, that becomes frustrating and it becomes an issue.

06:52And we have seen that programs that we have been able to take from a client, give them suggestions on how we can streamline it, you know, make it just much easier to actually do the job. We've seen those are the programs that our reps like the most, feel that there's the most thought that's gone into it. And those are the ones that we have less turnover on. I'm gonna tie in the next one here right into that. And that's your reps need to have a say. Do you treat your associates just like they're workers? Just like do what we say. Cause so many contact centers do that. Like here's what I need you to do. just go sit in your station, go sit at your house and just do this. The best feedback that you get is from your associates. They're the ones that are gonna help you with process more than anything because they're living, eating, breathing it every single day.

07:42So if you don't listen to your associates, that's a huge issue. And that's something that is kind of a psychic income. It's not physical, it's not tangible income from a money standpoint, but it's psychic income that they're being listened to, that they're being heard, that you're kind of trying to help them in different aspects of their job. That's a huge, I think, piece of this as well is we don't listen to our frontline associates enough. We don't listen to what they have to say because so many of them, including our frontline supervisors have such great ideas, things that we would never think about, but they're the actual user. So the user experience can really change based on their opinion. So having them have a say is huge. Number four is engagement, right? Making sure that we are engaging with our associates. I just had a meeting with all of my higher management here today at Expivia.

08:37And again, if I really don't stay on it sometimes, then we kind of, it gets fudged a little bit, right? I'm huge on controlling the first hour of the shift, two hours of the shift, now that we're work from home, it takes a little bit longer. Having that team meeting that everybody's gotta to be on video if you're work from home. Making sure then this is the part that where they kind of skip sometimes if I don't stay on them is taking one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and going through your roster of your team doing an individual, I am, I'm sorry, doing an individual video chat with each of those reps, asking if they're okay, ask them about their day, give them their goals, right? A quick just one-on-one is so really important, especially when we're work from home. We need to communicate more. We're not in the call center.

09:27We can't greet somebody and have music playing and high five them and say, hey, Janie, how's your son doing? We have to go out of our way now to really do that. And it's frustrating for a lot of reps and I think it's frustrating for Supervisors because it is extra work. But I think it's something that really, really needs to be done. What games are you playing? Work from home games, you can think of a ton of them. Anything that you can really do in the call center, you can really think through a way to do it at home, do it for more work from home, right? Because you have video, you can record things, you can play games on our online. There's things that you can do. We did a whole episode again on work from home games, so check that episode out as well.

10:10It's something that's really, really important. It's gotta be fun. The other thing is, this is kind of random, but we were talking about this the other day, is what committees, and when everybody was in the office, it was much easier, But we can still do Zoom calls of committee meetings, of having a game committee, having an onboarding and a welcoming committee. Having these reps, we have a PCI and a compliance committee with some of our associates. We have another committee that does deal with advances and things that they wanna do in the call center. So before it was, what chairs do we want? Do the headsets we have stink? They would test all that stuff out so that we would get really buy-in from our associates before that stuff went to the floor. Kind of like a little bit of an employee senate, or employee house of representatives.

11:00I think that stuff's really important and from the engagement standpoint. And again, their voice is being heard. You're listening to them, and you're not listening to them to like, because it's like a pity thing. You're listening to them because they have really good ideas, right? Not all of them are great, right? But so many of them have such good ideas because again, they're living, eating, breathing it. And the last thing here is growth. And do they have the potential to move on from their job? Is there any type of job advancement? We've seen making sure that we get our reps to 90 days. That's kind of the goal, right? If we can get an associate to 90 days, they normally stay for that year and most of them stay for longer than that. But we got to get them to 90 days. That's where the struggle is.

11:46And I think for most jobs, that's where you kind of get the bind from a culture standpoint at that 90 day mark. So we have not only doing those kind of teen things where we're talking to them, but HR is also reaching out at 10 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days. And they're doing reviews and they're talking to them, making sure everything is okay. Talking to them about where would you like to be a year from now, talking about that type of advancement. We are also doing weekly agent analysis. If you have not heard about this, it's again, it's another episode, you got to listen to it because it's really cool. Basically we do a 15 minute meet and greet with every single associate supervisor, everything associate once a week where we go over stats, we go over progression, we go over just anything that really that associate wants to talk to and talk about and we try to keep it as positive.

12:42isn't a negative thing, like, you know, we're not talking about, you know, if their QA scores are really low, we're talking about how we can raise QA scores, right? We're trying to keep this constantly on a positive note. Having said that, you guys know I'm huge on, when we're coaching as well, I think that this is a huge way that reps can just get mad and storm off. Make sure that you're coaching in private, make sure that you're celebrating and high-fiving and saluting out in public, right? So again, if you're work from home, and that means you're doing a private message or a private video if somebody needs to be coached. And if somebody's doing something awesome, then that's gotta be in the, we use Slack, it's gotta be in the general channel for that program or for the entire company of how awesome somebody did.

13:28So I think that's another kind of cultural kind of communication kind of tip as well. So again, if you really think about this, right, and you pie this all together, if you're paying your reps an appropriate amount, right, in that 14, 15, 16, 17, no matter somewhere in that range, right, depending on where you are, I understand in a big city, you're gonna be 20 plus, right, in a city like Erie, we can be less than that. And I think that's why a BPO works in areas like this. If your processes are well thought out, you're not frustrating associates, you're listening to them. If you're engaging every single day with your associates, your supervisors are into it. You have HR personnel that's talking to these guys, making sure that they're okay, right? It's been an interesting kind of couple months, right? In really almost years with COVID, so making sure that people are doing okay.

14:24If you have growth potential and advancement, and you're talking to these guys all the time about how they can advance, and you really allow them to have a say, right? You take their suggestions, you have committees, you're listening to what they have to say, and you're acting upon a lot of the things that they talk about. [QA coverage remark omitted] That the reps trust that what they say is gonna happen, that you're trying your darndest to make their environment great, right? So this cannot be just a do what I say kind of thing. If you do that, your turnover is gonna be through the roof. You gotta really add the cultural aspect to it and try to make people feel comfortable in their environment, whether that's work from home, whether that's in the office.

15:15So that's kind of some of the things I have on turnover. We may even break some of the stuff down. Some of the ICMI thought leaders that are coming on, this will be another topic that we have with some of those guys, which I'm kind of excited about. Hey, I just, as I wrap this episode up too, I wanna let you know we do have the book, right? More advice, I'm sorry, Advice from McCall CineGeek 3.0, it's on Amazon. There's a Kindle version and a paperback. It's over 200 pages of all the thoughts that I can possibly think about to help you and to add value. So make sure that you check that out. Also, if you are not part of our SMS texting community, just text, let's text Groundhog Day, right? so I know that it came from here, to 814-247-0366. That'll get you signed up for that.

16:04If you have any questions about your contact center, that's the way you can reach out to me and I will answer as many questions as I possibly can. It's been getting a little crazy lately, which is awesome, which I'm excited about. So if I delay for a day or two, kind of bear with me with that. And then last but not least, we have the LinkedIn call center tips and tactics group that I would urge you to join as well, which allows a lot of colleagues to answer and help with questions as well. So again, thank you guys very much. I hope that that helps and we'll talk again next week.