Another call center agent walks out the door in what feels like a never-ending string of resignations. Your team is understaffed, and hiring and training new agents seems to be taking up all your time as a call center manager. Meanwhile, you have very few experienced agents on the phones, and many of your newly-onboarded agents are struggling to find the information they need to help customers—increasing their stress and creating bad customer experiences.
This scenario is all too common in the call center industry, where the average agent attrition rate is close to 40%. As a call center manager or director, you may feel like you’re trapped in a vicious cycle. Agents quit because they’re stressed out, increasing the stress for the remaining agents and new hires tasked with handling high call volumes, leading to more resignations.
So how can you break the cycle? It starts with paying attention to where your agents are struggling and giving them the guidance and resources they need to succeed.
Transforming your agent experience isn’t something that will happen overnight–but there are steps you can take now to reduce agent stress, increase job satisfaction, and improve service delivery. Below, we’re sharing 10 best practices to improve call center agent retention.
1. Simplify agent training with a single process
Training is essential to ensure agents are capable of assisting customers. However, it’s often drawn out and tedious because agents must get up to speed with a large tech stack and familiarize themselves with a wide array of products and services.
Your call center can simplify training and reduce onboarding time by bringing agent workflows into a single interface. Look for a real-time agent guidance platform that provides dynamic workflows, knowledge base resources, and coaching prompts to agents during their customer conversations. This will save your agents from having to navigate between different systems or memorize your company’s entire knowledge base. It will also enable your contact center to spend less time on technical training topics and focus more on soft skills and professional development–improving job satisfaction and service delivery.
2. Connect systems and processes for swift data retrieval
To make a single agent interface successful, you need to connect all the data sources that help your agents assist customers. This will likely include your CCaaS system, CRM, ticketing platform, knowledge base, and process automation platforms. Your real-time assistance platform should put the right data in front of your agents at the right time (based on what’s happening in the customer conversation) and make it easy for the agent to automatically save new information in the correct system. Look for a platform that integrates with the systems your call center already uses and offers an open API so you can integrate new systems as needed.
3. Use conversation intelligence to uncover agent performance insights
You can’t truly understand how your agents are doing if your quality assurance team only reviews 1-2% of their customer interactions. Conversation intelligence software lets you monitor every customer interaction for the agent performance criteria that matters. This gives you an unbiased, 360-degree view of what each agent is doing well and where there’s room for improvement. You can use the performance insights you uncover to reward agent successes, prioritize team-wide training initiatives, and tailor individual coaching sessions (which leads us to the next tactic).
4. Provide data-backed coaching
It’s frustrating for agents to get vague feedback they can’t act on or to have their performance evaluations tied to metrics they don’t have full control over. Analyzing 100% of your agents’ interactions lets your managers get specific with their feedback and set goals based on things agents can control, such as setting appropriate expectations for next steps and avoiding powerless-to-help language. When agents receive data-backed coaching and concrete goals, they’re empowered to deliver better customer service.
5. Listen to agent feedback
Feedback should be a two-way street for agents and managers. Give agents multiple outlets for sharing their feedback, such as one-on-one sessions with their manager and employee satisfaction surveys. When agents leave your call center, conduct exit interviews to understand what motivated them to go and what your call center could improve upon. You can also use conversation intelligence as a source of unsolicited feedback. For example, you might look for instances in which agents are using powerless-to-help language to uncover opportunities for additional training or policy changes that could improve agent autonomy.
6. Head off stressful situations with root cause analysis
Understanding the top reasons your customers are contacting your business can help you get ahead of potentially stressful situations, such as a high volume of calls driven by a specific product or website issue. Use your conversation data to identify trending issues and work with the appropriate department leaders to address them, reducing the need for customers to contact your business about the issue in the future.
You can also analyze your conversation data to uncover the top issues that could be resolved through self-service. Update your processes, messaging, and knowledge base to direct customers to the appropriate self-service channels to resolve these issues. This will deflect unnecessary calls and increase your agents’ bandwidth to assist customers with complex issues that can’t easily be resolved through self-service.
7. Let generative AI assist your agents
Generative AI applications can take on some of the repetitive (but necessary) processes that take up your agents’ valuable time. For example, generative AI software can write call summaries, reducing the time agents spend on after-call work. Agents and managers can even use generative AI to ask questions about their conversation data and get human-like responses, enabling employees to identify and understand conversation trends and insights without relying on a data science team.
8. Get creative with rewards and incentives
Rewards and incentives show agents their hard work is appreciated, increasing their job satisfaction. If your contact center doesn’t already have a rewards program, consider implementing one and offering performance-based financial incentives, such as gift cards or bonuses, or valuable non-monetary rewards, such as additional paid time off or shorter working hours on a Friday.
Worried that financial incentives aren’t viable for your call center? Evaluate the cost of agent churn to your call center and consider reinvesting money saved from churn reduction into an incentive program.
9. Offer resources to support agent wellbeing
There’s no getting around it: working as a call center agent can be stressful, especially when agents are handling difficult or emotional conversations. While the right technology and training can help reduce stress, it’s still important to watch for signs of agent burnout and offer agent well-being and mental health resources when appropriate. If possible, partner with your company’s HR department to offer mental health support benefits and free access to mental health-focused apps. Make sure that when your managers meet with agents, they are watching for signs of stress and talking to the agents about the best ways to support them.
10. Create a clear path for progression
Studies on employee well-being and attrition consistently show that one of the top reasons people leave a company is because there are no opportunities for advancement. If you want to keep your best agents, you need to give them career growth opportunities. Set clear criteria for advancing to a supervisory or management position and offer training to help agents build the necessary skills.
Make call center agent retention a priority
Delivering great customer service should be a priority for call centers, but you can’t have a great customer experience if you’re not empowering your frontline agents to be successful. Your customers’ interactions with your call center can shape their entire impression of your brand. When your call center struggles with high agent attrition, customers are more likely to experience long hold times, call transfers, and interactions with inexperienced and flustered agents—all factors that negatively impact your company’s reputation and make customers more likely to leave.
When you invest in your agent experience, you incentivize agents to stay with your company for longer, reducing your turnover rate and improving your customer interactions. Treat your agents well and give them the resources they need so they can elevate your customer experience.
This blog post is adapted from a section of our eBook, “Simplify your agent experience to deliver for your customers.” You can get the full eBook here.
