Top 5 Tips for Retaining Contact Centre Agents 2020

There are a lot of important things that business leaders need to consider when building the perfect contact centre. You need to ensure that you have the right platforms in place to support an omni-channel environment for customer contact. It’s also worth thinking about which disruptive technologies might be useful for your workplace.

However, no part of your contact centre can thrive if you don’t have the right talent in place. Unfortunately, finding the right employees for a contact centre is pretty difficult. Not only does the call centre have a bad reputation for being a gruelling and often exhausting workplace, but turnover rates usually sit at up to 45% – making it one of the highest turnover locations for any worker.

So, how can you retain your contact centre agents once you find them?

Let’s find out.

1.    Deliver the Right Tools

Ultimately, there are few things more important to today’s contact centre than the right technology. We’re living in a world where chatbots and automated systems are dealing with common and repetitive issues for clients. This means that agents are left to handle the more complex queries.

To survive in this new environment, agents need support from everything from dashboards full of crucial information, to virtual assistants. A virtual assistant in a contact centre can surface contextual information about a conversation in seconds, using CRM systems and call analytics. This provides the agent with everything they need to drive a better outcome, without forcing them to jump between multiple tabs and software solutions to find what they need.

2.    Empower Your Agents

As mentioned above, there’s a growing demand to remove some of the repetitive tasks from the shoulders of the contact centre agent and give them to a bot instead. Figuring out which tasks to remove from your agent’s workload could be an excellent way to reduce the amount of time they need to spend on mundane issues. The less your agent’s attention is taken up by unnecessary tasks, the more they can focus on solving complex problems.  Robotic process automation and chatbots will be more vital than ever going into 2020.

Other ways to empower your agents in the new era is to make sure that the right conversations are routed to the right people. Use skills-based routing to determine that each agent can use their unique skills to deliver more satisfied clients.

3.    Track, Measure and Improve

Examining and evaluating the performance of a contact centre has always been an important process. However, it’s important to make sure that you’re examining the right metrics. Today, it’s possible to look at everything from the sentiment of customers, to overall customer satisfaction. Focusing on customer-focused metrics will allow you to encourage behaviour that supports happier customers and more confident contact centre agents.

While you’re tracking customer satisfaction, don’t forget to gather information about how your agents feel too. Surveying your agents with anonymous polls and questionnaires will help you to discover areas in your workplace that you can improve to drive better satisfaction. You may even find some roadblocks that have been stopping your agents from reaching their true potential.

4.    Deliver Ongoing Training

In a world where agents are dealing with more complex queries than ever before, it’s important for them to have access to the right training. The contact centre is becoming the last call for customers who can’t find solutions for their problems on their own. That means that each of your agents needs to become a specialist in your software, product, or service.

Providing ongoing training can also ensure that your employees can make the most of the new technology that you’re implementing for their benefit. For instance, teaching your employees how to use things like virtual assistants to take extra tasks off their shoulders could help them to become more productive and efficient workers.

5.    Reward and Recognise

Finally, in all workplaces – including the contact centre- recognition is crucial. We all like to feel as though we’re getting the respect and attention that we deserve in exchange for the effort that we’re putting in. Rewarding and recognizing your people for the things that they do to keep your customers happy is a great way to keep them feeling satisfied.

Even a little gamification where you can display employee metrics on wallboards around the office can spark more engagement from your team members. Just make sure that the workplace doesn’t get too competitive as a result.

Retain Your Valuable Agents

Ultimately, the contact centre agent is one of the most valuable assets that you have. Without these dedicated and talented people, you can’t deliver the meaningful experiences that your customers need. However, with turnover in the contact centre so high – it’s important to have a plan in place for how you’re going to keep your agents happy.

What are you going to do to ensure that you retain your talent in 2020 and beyond? Let us know in the comments section below.