Attrition

Attrition (and absence) is widely recognised as being as the #1 issue affecting the customer contact industry and annual reports have indicated that the issue is escalating year on year.

You will be very well aware of the impact that this can have on your operations. You will also be familiar with the many suggestions published on how to address this problem by industry experts and others.

Recent research* published provides the industry’s recommendations on the top five ways to improve attrition;

1. Skills Development
2. Communication
3. Promotion/Progress
4. Management Style
5. Work-Life Balance

These are important activities that you will undoubtedly be working hard on, but have you ever felt that all your efforts are simply bouncing off some employees while others want more?

‘Recruiting the right people for the job’ came in at #6 on the list. However, business psychologists would argue that if this was number one it could have a greater positive impact than any of the existing top five.

Identifying the right ‘soft’ skills or attitude required for the job is already a well established and successful part of the recruitment process for many contact centre operators. ContactCentreRecruitment provides this service online, cost effectively and accessible by all companies.

The Contact Centre Report was developed specifically for companies that have a large inbound and outbound teleworking force and includes the following topic areas.

  • Dealing with Inbound Calls
  • Dealing with outbound calls
  • Customer Focus
  • Candidate’s likelihood of staying in the job
  • The kind of work environment management should create to get the best from this candidate

Interview questions are provided with each topic and the PeopleMaps business psychologists have peppered the report with comments to give you a deeper insight.

The report also incorporates a ‘benchmarking’system so you can quickly psychometrically profile the best (and worst if you want) performing employees in your organisation and benchmark everyone applying for the job against this.

In a recent pilot in a contact centre in the West of Scotland, the company used this method and reduced the amount of interviewing that HR had to do by 70% and after six months the attrition or ‘churn’ rate had dropped from 46% to 12%.

The report is available in your account (which is free to set up), simply sign up and use the ContactCentreRecruitment profiling service. Remember ContactCentreRecruitment solutions require no consultancy or training to use – so no costs are incurred for these.

* Report published by the Professional Planning Forum