Adapting Agent Engagement to Survive the Great Resignation

Natalie Mackay at Five9 explores adapting agent engagement to survive the Great Resignation.

The Great Resignation is far from over. In fact, 4.5 million quit their jobs in November 2021, matching the series high in September, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Contact centres are not immune to these high attrition rates.

Turning a blind eye to employees’ changing expectations has been costing contact centres dearly since long before the Great Resignation. The replacement cost of an employee can be close to half of their annual salary.

For an employee making $60,000 per year, that comes out to $30,000 – $45,000 in recruiting and training costs. If your attrition rate is high, you can imagine how detrimental this could be to your bottom line.

Developing a plan to reward and motivate your agents can drastically change this outcome. Setting clear performance goals, enabling remote agents to connect with their peers, and rewarding top performers leads to engaged agents.

Agents who have higher engagement are more likely to stay and, with the right culture and training, move up in their careers within the contact centre.

Create a Culture of Transparency and High Performance From Anywhere

When agents are working remotely, it can be difficult to know if they’re aware of their individual goals and their progress toward team goals. A Performance Dashboard enables you to provide real-time feedback no matter where your agents work.

Contact centre supervisors can use wallboards to display agent performance against their peers and show how close the team is toward meeting KPIs. Performance Dashboards provide transparent performance goals for agents, keeping them on track and aware no matter where they work.

Enable Agents and Supervisors to Connect With Their Team

A culture of healthy competition can create a fun, interactive environment for agents that will drive better performance and develop the team into a united selling force. Agents can stay connected with their peers by challenging each other in constructive ways.

Supervisors can also leverage usage statistics within the platform to see their team’s overall adoption rate, and understand if there are individual agents or groups of agents who might not be logging in. This can help supervisors proactively reach out to agents who might need additional training or might be disengaged.

Motivate and Reward Top Performers With a Variety of Prizes

Motivation is not one size fits all, and Gamification gives you the option to set a wide variety of prizes for your top performing agents. From tickets to a sports game to priority shift bidding, there’s no limit to what rewards you can provide your agents.

Supervisors can also offer high performing agents rewards like being able to take the rest of the day off because they already hit quota. If an agent has been on a long call with an unhappy customer, supervisors can also “reward” the agent by sending calls that involve a faster resolution for the rest of the day.

As employee expectations continue to change, so must the contact centre’s approach to engaging their agents.

Contact centre leaders must continue to develop their agents; looking at them as not just an agent in a contact centre, but as someone who has the potential to progress their career within the organization.

Keeping agents productive, motivated, and connected to their team are a few ways contact centres can reduce agent attrition and combat the Great Resignation.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Five9 – View the Original Article

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Five9 provides end-to-end solutions with omnichannel routing, analytics, WFO, and AI to increase agent productivity and deliver tangible business results.

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Five9