Four Ideas to Help Retool Your WFM Planning for the Coming Storms I was struck by a report that tornadoes were spawned from a Hurricane in Texas. As if a hurricane is not already too much! The idea that a concentrated danger can be found within a broader ...
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Agent Turnover is costly and disruptive to call centers - - and it is going up as the economy improves. Our benchmark data over the last decade show that since 2014, agent turnover is heading back toward pre-recession peaks.
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Do you know what your true cost of turnover is? When I ask this question to groups of call center managers, few raise their hands. Yet it is important to know how much it costs to recruit, on-board and train agents for two main economic reasons: a) turnover ...
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The surveys taken by the respondents included two open-ended questions:
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Our research showed some interesting results when surveys were broken down by geographical region. The following information is for the U.S. only:
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There has been much speculation but little hard data regarding the relative merits of large centers vs. smaller centers. Our research offers a window into the impact of center size on agent satisfaction, which is important given the attendant impact of agent ...
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While most managers do not consider commuting distance in their recruiting and hiring decisions, the following data challenges this norm.
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The over 5000 agents surveyed for our study broke down as follows between Full-time and Part-time:
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Parsing out agent satisfaction by tenure provides some interesting results:
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Agents participating in this survey N = 4,683 (90.4%) Leads participating in this survey N = 497 (9.6%) The role of “Lead” or “Team Lead” varies from center to center. In general, however, the Lead is a senior agent who supports newer agents, handles ...
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The skills of ‘taking initiative and taking ownership’ are being evaluated on more performance reviews these days at all levels of responsibility. Some organizations nurture these skills and harness the results more than others. Agents, like all employees, ...
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This area is of obvious importance to agent satisfaction. Agents tend to stay and be satisfied where they feel valued and appreciated.
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Research shows that the relationship between a contact center agent and his or her supervisor is a crucial component of agent satisfaction. Fostering good working relationships at the team level is one of management’s most important functions.
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Contact center professionals are, in general, people who feed off of the approval of others, both external (customers) and internal (managers and colleagues). Superiors who understand this dynamic and who act on it help foster positive feelings and superior ...
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As every lawyer knows, the three elements of a contract are “offer”, “acceptance” and “consideration” (compensation). A clear, common understanding of what the offer entails is key, and a reasonable level of mutual satisfaction with the compensation is ...
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Job initiation and career prospects are both very important to contact center agents, as they are to all employees. This category starts with questions about initial training and transition and then asks questions about the individual’s professional and ...
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Contact center agents are, generally speaking, “people people” who like to interact both with customers and with their colleagues.
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”Leadership means never having an off day.” Not many leadership teams can live up to this high standard, and contact center leadership is no exception. However, we have to try! The questions in this category focus on whether leadership listens to employees, ...
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Vision is what helps employees see beyond the day-to-day tasks that confront them. It links them to something more important, more engaging and more energizing.
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Our Agent Voices blog posts are drawn from the results of research on over 5,000 agent surveys conducted in North America.
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Agent burnout is often correlated to the culture of the call center and to the culture of the people working in the call center. Sweatshop centers and “crisis call” centers have particularly high levels of burnout. A statistical proxy for burnout is agent ...
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