Workforce Management Featured Article
Curbing High Turnover in the Call Center
It’s no secret that call center work has high turnover rates. The work isn’t exactly anyone’s dream job, and it’s often micro-managed. It’s a high-pressure job in a high-pressure environment. But for some workers, it’s less about the calls and more about the center itself. With that many people working shoulder to shoulder, it’s a recipe for stress and sickness.
In a recent blog post for home-based agent call center outsourcer LiveOps (News - Alert), Lourdes, who formerly worked in a physical call center, noted that people crammed in like sardines isn’t a recipe for good employee engagement.
“And when I worked there, I was always sick,” she said. “There’s 200, maybe 300 people in a call center. Whoever doesn’t have a cold has something else and passes it around, so you always get sick.”
In addition to sickness, noise, and stress, there are escalating commuting costs that call center workers – not usually very highly paid – are having to absorb. For many, especially those with families, it feels like they’re going backwards. In addition, rigid schedules with minimal breaks mean that workers can’t see the dentist, pick up a sick child from school, attend to an elderly parent or even afford to stay home when ill. It’s a nearly impossible career choice for people with disabilities.
Progressive Companies are Exploring Home-Based Work
If you’re requiring agents to be glued to their seats in accordance with rigid schedules, you’re probably not getting the best workers. The best workers may have family obligations, disabilities or overly long commutes. By switching to a home-based agent model – for at least some of your agents – you can take advantage of talent pools that may not be located within commuting distance of your contact center. This includes more mature and experienced agents who are less likely to leave the job for an extra 50 cents an hour from the call center across town.
Studies have shown that home-based call center agents tend to be more productive and provide superior service to callers when compared with their contact center-based colleagues, delivering exceptional performance in key performance indicators with fewer behavioral issues.
Using Cloud-Based Solutions to Enable Virtual Agents
Home-based agents were once a difficult prospect from a technological standpoint: to use the phone system or the call center applications, one had to be physically present in the office. This is no longer the case. Modern workforce management solutions and other call center applications, delivered in the cloud, provide the same technology and service capabilities to an agent’s home computer and web browser as they would have at a workstation in the physical call center. No installation is required, data sharing remains secure, and call center managers have more flexibility in the forecasting and scheduling process, since home-based agents can pick up a single hour or two here and there to balance the schedule, whereas you wouldn’t ask a call center-based worker to come in for an hour.
Solutions such as Verint Monet’s cloud workforce management for contact centers bring forecasting, scheduling, workforce management and other functions to a virtual workplace that can be used by both office-based and home-based agents, so they can be managed as teams regardless of their physical location. Service and contact center efficiency is enhanced when the right numbers of agents – whether physically present or virtual -- with the necessary skills are taking care of your customers.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
