As attrition rates rise around the globe, the entire call centre industry is asking “what happened to our agents?” Revolving doors are spinning faster than the spin cycle on an industrial washing machine as agents leave en mass. The cost of replacing them with new-hires is growing rapidly, the local employment pool is shrinking, and many companies are resorting to calling former staff to inquire if they would like to come back. With the average attrition rate around 25%, staffing is becoming a crisis, and most companies are left scratching their heads trying to understand what is going wrong.
Well, here’s a core problem: nearly half of call centres do not even measure agent satisfaction. How would you like to work there? Your boss does not care enough to even ask if you like your job. Along the same line, 86% of employees say that feeling valued is an important factor for job satisfaction. The same survey showed that only 37% felt valued. That’s a lot of unhappy people. In fact, a 2005 study reveals that only 55% of employees felt well-treated by their company and only 41% said their company treated them as valueable assets.
We all know that frontline agent work is demanding and frequently frustrating. Most of us understand the importance of the agent’s role. Yet how much effort is put into acknowledging that? Do you treat your agents as valuable assets or entry-level workers? Are phone-workers recognized as skilled labour, or are offline workers threatened with “being sent back to the phones”? Are efforts made to assess agent morale, or are snap decisions taken without any regard given to employee impact? Studies indicate that agents are underappreciated or outright ignored, yet they perform the most demanding work and are the primary assets of any call centre.
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