In your opinion, how important is staff retention compared to say 5 years ago and what are the biggest challenges managers need to overcome when attempting to reduce turnover?
Staff retention is much more important now that it has ever been, because companies are finding that their call center people aren't so easily replaced anymore for many reasons. First, employee turnover contradicts customer service goals. If you have new people constantly coming in to replace exiting ones, you lose continuity and consistency of service. Productivity is also lost in ramping up the new employee.
Second, call centers can't afford high turnovers anymore. If they are to shake off their image of being an expense rather than a strategic contributor, they need to eliminate unnecessary costs associated with high turnover rates and constant recruiting.
Third, the hiring market is now more competitive today as the economy rebounds. Applicants can afford to be pickier about the jobs they take. That also means that existing employees are more likely to jump ship for a few dollars more per hour or more perks.
The biggest challenge here is to have a process in place that minimizes turnover in the first place, and that means starting at the beginning – call centers need to recruit people who are likely to succeed and not quit in the first place. If you don't start with motivated, qualified people, you'll be trying to force a square peg in a round hole – which ultimately never works.
An effect of stacking the deck with the right people is that your people are happier at work, now that they're surrounded with like-minded co-workers who can pull their own weight. This also drives productivity and customer service levels.
What are the common misconceptions of motivation/retention tools and techniques as far as you are concerned?
One of the main misconceptions that underlie many motivational techniques is that you can mould anyone into a customer service job. (That's like thinking anyone can be turned into an accountant or engineer or doctor.) This may work with some agents who have aptitude, but others are simply not cut out for the job. It's very difficult to train someone to get to work on time, for example – they have to be that kind of person before they are hired.
So knowing this in the hiring stage is invaluable. Unfortunately, many recruiters are pressed to quickly fill open positions and do so on the basis of one interview or a simple personality test. But neither can be sophisticated enough to give an accurate gauge of the whole person. We are all made up of a complex mix of strengths, weaknesses, personality and potential – so any test must be equally sophisticated to make the right assessment.
Without starting with people who are a fit with your culture and competency requirements, call centers are throwing good money after bad in trying to save employees who don't want to be saved or aren't right for the job.
Technically, how advanced are we today with the effectiveness of personality profiles and predicating staff behavior in a job?
The industry has evolved significantly, so we are much more advanced than just a few years ago. But the market is still flooded with one-dimensional solutions that mask these advances. For example, the traditional personality scales (e.g. DISC) used by many companies today only measure about 14% of the qualities that contribute to success on the job. Typically, they're cheap and easy to use, but in the end, you tend to get what you pay for.
Instead, call centers need to be committed to investing in their processes, not in Band-Aid fixes. So their recruitment process should be the first line of defence against employee turnover by determining such things as: can a candidate work under the pressure of heavy call volumes, or managing frustrated customers while multi-tasking, or accurately and fully capturing data, or up-selling to help increase revenue?
To predict this kind of behavior, call centers need thoughtfully-formulated questions that are backed by research, not simple yes/no questions that give away the right answer. These assessments are available today to give an accurate profile of a person before hiring.
Recruitment process or retention strategy - which is the greatest contributing factor of staff turnover?
Again, we believe it all starts from recruitment. People are your greatest assets, so it's critical that you start out with the best people for your needs. When it comes to staff turnover, the GIGO principle still applies – garbage in, garbage out. If you begin with a person who is not the right fit, you typically don't get the quality of work, employee satisfaction or employee loyalty out of it.
In the perfect world, if you have an accurate hiring process and a reasonable work environment, you may never have to worry about turnover. On the other hand, if you don't pay attention to the kind of people coming in, employee retention will always keep you up at night. So that should give some indication of how much recruitment influences retention.
What are the biggest mistakes contact center managers sometimes make when trying to reduce staff turnover?
The biggest mistake we see is to see retention as a separate process from recruitment. They are both on the same employee lifecycle, just at different stages. Therefore, they will profoundly influence one another.
Focusing on retention without addressing recruitment only treats the symptom but not the disease, and the problem will rarely go away on its own. Or to mix metaphors, it's also like heating up a room at wintertime with the window wide open.
How can we measure the effectives of different retention methods?
That's hard to say, if you look at it this way. Say you have a retention method that reduces attrition from 40% to 20% - that's a 50% reduction in turnover. Now compare this to another method at a different company that reduces turnover from 15% to 10%. Which one is better?
The second company more likely has a better recruitment process and/or work environment that eliminates the need for a massive retention initiative in the first place. And both companies might be doing the same thing for turnover, but the second simply doesn't have as much room for improvement, because its people are happier and less likely to leave.
This isn't to say that retention methods aren't effective – many are. You just need to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. But again, that's still like debating on who makes a better aspirin or portable heater than getting to the root of the problem.
At the root of the problem – the hiring process – call centers can evaluate the effectiveness of assessment tools as well as pre-screening and interviewing processes by looking at the scientific measures. This means a systematic investigation of the common denominators across different locations, which determines the validity co-efficient, or effectiveness, of such tools and processes.
