Customers are a fundamental part of the business because company grows as long as you keep them happy and gratified with your brand. To make sure that customer needs are being catered perfectly, it is mandatory to keep frontline employees contented. You may already be acquainted with this old adage by Vaughn Aust, ‘Happy employees lead to happy customers, which leads to profits.’
Companies running an in-house call center face the hassle of high employee turnover, which has a trickle-down effect, resulting in dropped CSAT score. As a result of weak CSAT scores, problems related to business growth amplify. In simple words, both customer satisfaction and agent retention go hand-in-hand.
Here, it becomes imperative to understand, ‘How do specialized customer care service providers like call center in India retain support representatives?’ Below-mentioned ideas can be implemented to retain loyal and diligent call center agents with ease:
HIRING AS PER JOB DESCRIPTION:-
Agent attrition turns up if you don’t take hiring process seriously. Every interviewee has different skill set, thus, it’s your responsibility to assess and appoint those candidates who seem the right fit for the respective role and company.
During the interview process, you should evaluate candidate’s skillset, personality, temperament, and most importantly experience because handling frustrated customers day in and day out takes a heavy toll on agent’s peace of mind. The best move to get the right candidates on board is to conduct role-playing activities during the hiring process, to ensure that right person is hired for right role. This will keep hassle of employee churn at bay and save all the money that could be wasted in hiring & training resources continuously.
For example, if you come across a candidate possessing good interpersonal skills, let him/her handle customers on the voice channel. While interviewees with amazing typing skills should be handling live chat/Email support requests.
The prominence of hiring the right candidates shouldn’t be overlooked as every call center in India secures high agent retention rate by giving proper attention to the hiring process.
OFFLOAD MUNDANE TASKS:-
Businesses face the problem of high employee turnover rate while running customer service operations when they only care about customers. Of course, customers are integral for any growing business, but it is imperative to understand that high CSAT scores cannot be attained without agent satisfaction.
The job of customer service reps isn’t easy as they have to do certain tasks even after rendering satisfactory resolution. Post call work consists of common tasks, but they take time to be done. Here, if you manage to remove such mundane tasks from the to-do list of agents, it will slash the workload which, in turn, leading to a better retention rate.
Artificial intelligence can take care of mundane tasks with aplomb and pave the way for high efficiency and can reduce margin of errors.
Apart from artificial intelligence, an alternative of self-service can also be provided to customers, to reduce the number of service requests and attain high satisfaction levels. This will allow agents to do tasks with high priority, and this will definitely boost your business’s productivity levels. So, if you really want to operate as an established call center in India, take the load of common/repetitive tasks off agent’s shoulders.
TRAINING FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT:-
The quality of training program always decides how well you are going to handle customer service operations. Generally, companies having an in-house call center aimed to shorten the training period so that their newly-joined agents starts getting involved in customer interactions as soon as possible.
Due to improper/unstructured training, agents have to face customer’s wrath during support interactions. When they are done with being insulted, they simply leave the organization or get involved in a heated argument with customers and cause customer dissatisfaction & get terminated from their job, eventually.
On the other hand, call centers never compromise with the training of their agents and reap benefits in the form of continuous delivery of inimitable solutions. They also go the extra mile by providing requisite additional training and conducting skill development programs periodically for the sake of uplifting the job satisfaction level of their agents. So, providing training at times is the key to securing a high agent retention rate.
EXIT INTERVIEWS:-
In an ideal world, you would have hardworking and trustworthy employees who would work for you until your business runs. As we are familiar with the reality, this will never be the case as employees leave the organization when the right time comes, no matter how strong relationship you share with them.
Plus, there is no point in holding employees in the name of policies as they won’t do their work willingly, and that is not good for your business’s health for sure. Thinking about offering same salary package to retain top-performing employees? Of course, this seems like a good tactic but it is not fruitful, because when someone has made up his mind to leave, then it doesn’t matter whether you meet their monetary expectations or not.
Instead of getting upset with support agents, you should conduct an exit interview with the goal of discovering why he/she wants to leave. Once you know the factors triggering employee turnover, you are likely to rectify them and ensure a long-lasting relationship with your remaining agents.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Retention of good employees always helps businesses to gain more stability and profitability. Therefore, companies should not only put attention on finding out and appointing the right people but also endeavour to keep them for ages. In this scenario, multinationals usually succeed as they delight their employees with outstanding facilities. On the flip side, SMEs, in terms of employee retention, still have a long way to go.
We hope above-mentioned pointers help you in the pursuit of slashing employee turnover rate. Thanks for reading!
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