ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 52) EXPERT’S ANGLE Train to Retain Top-Performing Agents BY LISA BRIGHT The call center agents who are most engaged in their jobs and aligned with their employers are the ones who are most committed to delivering outstanding customer care. They also know that keeping customers satisfied and loyal will help to ensure their companies’ success — and they recognize what a critical role they play in this ongoing endeavor. Tried-and-true strategies for ensuring that your best agents are engaged, committed, progressing… and satisfied. center agents who were seeking new jobs about what they disliked most about their current positions. The No. 1 issue cited was the lack of promotional opportunities. In a similar study of call center employee turnover by business applications, systems and service provider impacted by employee turnover. Higher training and recruiting costs were also among the top five issues. Fewer than half of the call centers that responded to the ICMI survey have a formal skill path that allows agents to earn a higher wage or hourly rate after attaining specific skill sets. And only slightly more than half have a formal career path in place that allows agents to advance within the call center or to other positions within the enterprise — certainly not a situation conducive to long-term engagement. With all this in mind, the following strategies will help you to create the training and development opportunities that will attract topnotch employees to your call center — and keep them engaged, on board and providing loyalty-building customer service. PROVIDE A BLENDED TRAINING APPROACH One of the best ways to build high levels of engagement is to provide agents with opportunities to learn, grow and advance in their jobs. By doing so, you demonstrate that you appreciate and value them as the intelligent, capable professionals that they are. Unfortunately, study after study shows that customer service employees are lacking these critical opportunities — and the resulting unhappiness is leading to sky-high turnover. For example, online recruiter Call Center Careers polled 1,000 call icmi’s insight Avaya, agents cited the lack of career paths, training and professional development among the top reasons for leaving their companies. Call center turnover is costly in more ways than one. In its 2007 Agent Turnover and Retention Report, ICMI found that the average direct cost when a frontline employee leaves ranges from $2,500 to $10,000. Further, nearly threefourths of companies cited loss of service quality as the No. 1 issue Today’s call center training goes far beyond product knowledge, focusing additionally on such critical skills as the correct language to use with specific clients, problem-solving skills, conflict resolution and call escalation. While training once focused on adhering to rigid callhandling times, the best modern training emphasizes active listening, insightful probing and devoting the time needed to resolve each question or problem to the customer’s complete satisfaction on www.icmi.com | SEPTEMBER 2007 52 http://www.icmi.com
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