The problem with attrition, which has been the main focus of all contact centres since their inception, is the associated issues such as high recruitment costs, wasted training budgets, business continuity and management problems, efficiency peaks and troughs and general headaches all round.

But it isn’t all bad news. Staff churn allows companies to lose underperforming or mismatched staff and replace them with more suitable candidates. That’s the theory anyway though as the average attrition rate illustrates getting it right is not easy. And regularly bringing in new high performers always gives the productivity a boost before they either burn out or leave as this type of person is quite likely to do.

So if you were hitting your targets with ease before the doors were closed you’ll be in a good position, but if not then your problems are only going to get worse just when you need to up your game.

Even if you have financial services clients, who are pumping a lot of money into customer relations to try and rebuild client confidence in themselves as well as their products and service, times are going to get a lot tougher before they get better.

Clients are shopping round and negotiating harder than ever before, performance indicators are being raised as fee income is falling and over the next 12 months at least the sector is going to witness a lot of casualties. So how can you guarantee your survival? In truth no one can, but there’s a lot you can do to increase the odds by making what you’ve got work better for you.

As in every other business you’ve not only to generate the revenue but also manage your risk or it will cancel out the former. That means auditing your business to asses you liabilities and your assets, and in contact centres that primarily means your people.

Pre-recession, attrition was one rough but ready guide to how well you were doing this. Too many people walking out the door during or after the expensive training you had lined up meant that you were exposing yourself to too many liabilities. Your recruitment process wasn’t doing its job right and the saving grace was that at least they left before damaging your productivity too. If they did stay but caused you more headaches than you deserved then, again, the wrong people were getting into your seats.

As customer contact is probably one of the most personality centric industries in the world, great advances have been made by some companies in improving recruitment processes by using personality profiling tools. This included creating personality ‘benchmarks’ based on existing successful employees so that HR new what ‘type’ it was looking for and could spot them walking in the door even before the interview.

(A contact centre in the west of Scotland used this method and reduced the amount of interviewing that HR had to do by 70% and after six months the attrition rate had dropped from 46% to 12%.)

In a nutshell, psychometric profiling gives an employer a snapshot view of the preferred behaviour that comes subconsciously to most people. This is the behaviour with which they are ‘comfortable’ and can sustain for long periods of time. This behaviour is social and intellectual, not physical and governs the nature, the work environment and, for the individual, their job satisfaction.

In the case of contact centre personnel, profiling can be used to measure everything from their team leader potential, their customer service abilities, even the likelihood that they will stay in the job long enough to complete the training and contribute.

Knowing the person’s motivations and natural preferences makes managing them, as well as their training and development, far easier. And as the right type of person is going to hang around long enough for the training to take effect productivity rose as recruitment costs fell.

With no flow through the out door, using profiling for recruitment is obviously less of an option but now is the time when you should be using it to audit your existing workforce and identifying your assets and liabilities and managing your risk effectively. And using online profiling technologies means that this is no longer a costly exercise, you can feasibly profile your entire team for hundreds not thousands of pounds, which is important. Unless you audit everyone you’re not managing your total risk exposure properly or constructively.

For example, by creating a ‘benchmark’ of the best (and worst if you want) performing employees in your organisation and comparing your current employees’ proximity to it will give you a remarkable insight into your human capital inventory.

For some the solution may just be targeted training to compensate for their variance from the ‘best fit’ benchmark, for others perhaps reassignment to another role to which they are more suited. For example, good desk people do not necessarily make good team leaders and vice versa. They are two completely different roles and require different key personality traits to be successful. But if you only ever promote good desk people the likelihood is you’ll end up with poorer team leaders and fewer good desk people.

Inbound and outbound, how often have you seen managers get it wrong when assigning people to either role, or even both?  Success is much more likely if the employee’s natural preferences are in tune with what the job requires and as stated earlier, when people are playing to their preferences they will work longer, harder and more productively than when they are not.

For team leaders and managers knowing what will turn on and turn off a team member means that you will be able to manage them more effectively and get the best out of them, (if it’s there for the taking).

Being able to reduce your risk by retraining, reassignment or even removal of liabilities will improve your operations and, importantly, your profitability. Plus you’ll be able to identify those people that you should be holding onto and getting the most out of them, so if push comes to shove and downscaling is a survival option you will have much more information on which to base decisions that will undoubtedly have a major impact going forward.

And when the recession draws to a close, having those established benchmarks in place so you can identify who you are looking for will help you to continue to manage your risk effectively and be in a strong position when it’s time to open the doors once more (if you need to that is).

The latest innovations in personality ‘benchmarking’ also allows recruiters to know what they are looking for by way of personality ‘Type’ and low cost volume testing means that they can assess every candidate against this at the time of application. However, there is a potential pitfall. Get the initial benchmark wrong and you won’t solve the problem you’re trying to tackle but may aggravate or even create another.

It is essential that when establishing the benchmark you know exactly what problem you are looking to solve.

All problems in a business are related. Nothing in any organisation acts in isolation and everything experiences; ‘effect – cause – effect’. Here is a list of problems you might be trying to deal with:

• My sales are too low
• My staff training and replacement costs are too high
• My client satisfaction score is too low
• My staff turnover is too high
• My staff performance is too low
• I have too many customer complaints which is upsetting my client
• I am losing client’s because we are not performing to our Service Level Agreements

When faced with new candidates who are you going to hire?

You can use personality profiling to help with all of these issues however you have to decide which problem you are working on as you really can only tackle one at a time. For instance, if you say you want to hire high performing sales people and reduce your staff turnover you’re already hitting an issue. From a personality perspective and as a broad generalisation, a contact centre environment is not conducive to natural high performance sales people, so they soon get bored and leave.

Hiring only sales focussed types would be likely to aggravate your staff churn problem, not reduce it and the potential knock-on effects that result are enormous.

With high staff turnover you will be training a lot of people only to see them walk out the door. At the recent Customer Contact Association annual conference a room full of Contact Centre Managers proposed that it costs £16,000 per head when someone leaves prematurely, and that’s before you factor in the invisible cost of upset clients and loss of earnings. So if you lose 100 people prematurely that’s a cost to your business of £1.6m. Ouch!

So where do you start? Well if you can reduce your staff turnover then at least you know your training will not be wasted. An average sales person can actually improve their results with the right training but they need to stay around long enough for you to have any influence on their performance.

If properly identified, there are personalities that may start slowly, yet consistently perform better month on month. They will absorb the training, and because of their personality type are content in a stable role. A modest investment in identifying these people to improve performance could save a big chunk of that £1.6M.