Alarmingly High Attrition

[AmitS]

Hi ,
My company is facing a serious concern of alarmigly high rate of attrition. "Attirition " ,we all face this big and dangerous word in the industry. We as a call center have tried various ways of retaining people through personalised counselling with the employees ...however most employees dont give the true picture why they wud like to quite ...either they say higher education or personal reason (family pressure)...its at times very difficult to get to the real root cause of such a situation ...Plzz help regards the same and provide with a POA at the earliest...Thanks

[emmaly]

Hi,

Attrition is a concern for all call centers, but you can get results without spending a fortune.

Our call centre (all incoming, no sales, 30 CSR's) had an attrition rate close to 40%, and we were spending a LOT on training new people.

First, we accepted that high attrition isn't an employee problem, it's a management problem. Then we started asking ourselves some tough questions.

Are the wages and benefits we offer comparable to other centers that are similar in size and function?

Are we hiring people with the right skill sets and providing appropriate training?

Are we providing regular, pertinent performance feedback?

Are our employees rewarded for exceptional performance and recognized publicly for it?

Do our employees understand that they are as responsible for morale as the management team is?

Are our employees comfortable coming to us with problems and concerns?

We want our employees to be loyal, committed, motivated, and to feel empowered rather than restricted. Are there any policies or procedures which are counter to this?

After answering this, we sent the questions, and the proposed solutions, out to the reps. We got overwhelming feedback. We kept our reps updated as we implemented necessary changes, and the response was incredible.

We now have quarterly gripe sessions over pizza, where the reps talk privately about what needs to be fixed and present management with a list of suggestions. Although some of the suggestions are silly (get rid of handle time stats, turn one of the conference rooms into a rec room, etc) we've gotten valuable suggestions. If there's a legitimate concern, we address it and put a solution in place.

Our attrition has dropped from nearly 40% to 8%, and morale has improved tremendously.

Hope this gives you some ideas. Good luck!

[AmitS]

Hi

We are suffering from high attrition at our call center the suggestion u provided was excellent but it was more focussed on tenured CSR`s than new recruits and we r facing problems in both the sectors the later being very high ....CSR`s with a tenure of 1-6 months r the one who quite fast moreover the traing provided and the facilities provided are good and cater to most of the needs we tried doing a Root Cause analysis too but still are confused with what to conclude ...Any ideas how we can actually move ahead ???
Regards,
AmitS

[emmaly]

Sounds challenging...

It would be helpful if I knew a bit more about your center. Incoming or outgoing calls? Sales or service? Do the majority of your reps have previous call center experience, or are they new to this type of environment?

[AmitS]

hi emma
my center deals mostly with financial products and the people joining in are colleg students and a few have work experience ....however the people get a good pay package and all other facilities and we r based in mumbai india where we cater to US customers ....the alarn bells r ringing loud dont understand wht to do ? plzz suggest some solution ...
Regards
AmitS

[emmaly]

Hi Amit,

An incoming IT center I was at a few years ago had this problem, and their solution was both innovative and very, very effective.

1) Applicant passes phone interview, is invited in for written and verbal testing. If they pass the testing, this is the point where most centres would offer them employment.
2) Instead, they spend a couple of hours listening in with a rep and taking notes.
3) At the end of the listening time, they're asked indepth questions to determine how they really feel about the calls they just heard. It's surprising how many people decide this work isn't for them. They saved about $1800 in training costs for each person who backed out at this point. The money that's saved is redirected into more aggressive recruiting, and the people who are hired are more likely to stay because they know exactly what it's going to be like.

So in short...maybe there's something more that can be done to weed out the people who aren't suited to this work.

On the other end, you might try anonymous exit questionnares mailed to former employees' homes, with a postage paid envelope for them to return it.

Whatever you choose, I'm truly interested in hearing how it works out for you. Good luck!

[n_meghanath]

Why would they leave?
Why wouldn't they leave?

List out the management view
List out the agents view.

Compare and you would get the answer. The reason is very close to the expectation gap of the agents and the management.

[josephafreddy]

Hi Amit

The main problem is that the exit interview is done at a time that three issues still remain uncleared.
1. The dues are generally not cleared.
2. The experience/relieving letter is not issued.
3. A reference check may always happen from the next organisation.

Employees would generally not rock the boat because they are worried about repercussions. Unless the company has a I'm OK Your OK approach and actual behaviouir from the seniors the actual reason for atrition will never come to the forefront.

You could perhaps be a little pro active and install suggestion boxes/complaint boxes at various places in your call center where your collleagues who man the telephones can drop their feedback with anonymiity. This will tell you if there is anything wrong with their supervisors attitude, low salary, difficult work conditions etc.

Hope this helps

[Larry Graham]

Our call center is a seasonal one primarily and we too have a difficult time finding good Customer Service Reps to join our company. The pay is no awful but not exceptional either. We have worked through some agencies to try and figure out how to keep some of these people that are talented within our organization. Still, it has been difficult. We have about an 80-90 percent attrition rate.

How do you all keep people or for that matter recruit people for seasonal work-most of ours is for snow removal which occurs primarily in the winter time.

Any insight will help on this.

[sank]

Hi emmaly/or any one else from inbound IT call center management,

You seems to be in the similar situation as I am into. I am also running a Inbound IT trouble shooting call center. I am planning to re-structure the salary structure.. Currently its all in salary and we just started with a very small incentive amount.

Now we are in the 2nd phase where most of our employees are crossing 1 year of their time and are due for appraisal.

Do u feel we should go for salary + incentive scheme. Specially when eventually I will have to take out incentive from the amount which I could have offered them as salary in total.

What r the parameters you are taking into consideration and also any long term incentive plans to retain them?

[omershah]

Originally Posted by AmitS

Hi ,
My company is facing a serious concern of alarmigly high rate of attrition. "Attirition " ,we all face this big and dangerous word in the industry. We as a call center have tried various ways of retaining people through personalised counselling with the employees ...however most employees dont give the true picture why they wud like to quite ...either they say higher education or personal reason (family pressure)...its at times very difficult to get to the real root cause of such a situation ...Plzz help regards the same and provide with a POA at the earliest...Thanks

This would take alot of work in the compensation and benefits arena, along side that you would require to create an enviroment that does not have alot of stress. Give two offs to your agents. If you want to know such methods get in touch with me at mianomarshah@hotmail.com

[faisal]

Hi

My call center, of customer services for a telecom sector, is facing a challenge of high Attrition rate. I am new in the industry and needs your help; please make me understand who to calculate the attrition rate. And what are the components involved in calculations. I will also very grateful if we could share the industry trend of the attrition per month and annum basis.

Regards
Faisal