How to Beat Agent Attrition

THE TIGHT LABOR MARKET HAS COME FOR THE CONTACT CENTER

Presented in Collaboration with our Partner, Amazon Web Services

You know the signs: increased average handle time (AHT), increased irritation, productivity decline. Even in a remote/hybrid workforce, contact center leaders (if they’re paying attention) can see when their employees are slipping. Next step—attrition. In this labor market your customers cannot afford to lose agents. The cost and time to hire is too high, so it is imperative that contact centers do what they can to retain talent.

Upskilling agents and promoting from within is the easiest, most cost-effective way for businesses to grow. Calabrio’s State of the Contact Center report details the push contact center managers are making to empower their agents and where they are lacking in critical resources to do so. You can empower your contact center customers to swiftly mitigate attrition with the Calabrio ONE suite of workforce optimization (WFO) solutions and Amazon Connect and Amazon Web Services.

This mix of solutions and services provides enterprise-grade, true cloud WFO that will evolve contact centers for the modern era of hybrid workforces, multichannel communications, and ever-demanding customers. It all comes down to the agent experience, and the dream of perfect work-life balance. If your customers can find that, all their troubles are over. Easy, right?

Focus on Agent Experience

To improve customer experience, businesses must address the agent experience. Nearly every contact center manager surveyed for Calabrio’s State of the Contact Center report (93%) say they’ve noticed agent stress impact customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. The most effective way to support and empower agents is to provide them with the right tools and technology. Today, this means easy to use, accessible software that gives agents control.

Calabrio WFM, along with Amazon Connect and AWS, grants agents self-scheduling capabilities to add work hours and move breaks around to accommodate their life. They can also trade shifts with coworkers without admin intervention—while maintaining staff-level requirements. This power is offered in the palm of their hands with the MyTime app, which lets agents stay informed and make changes wherever and whenever.

Giving agents freedom, whenever possible, is a sure way to increase engagement. Calabrio empowers agents to customize dashboards and reports to watch their performance throughout the day. Agents then have visibility to metrics in real time and motivate themselves to improve.

Upskilling + Growth

Engaging agents is just the tip of the iceberg—the least that contact centers can do to combat attrition. Leaders must get involved by providing regular evaluations and training. Forward thinking CC leaders use Calabrio Quality Management and Performance Coaching to understand the complete agent and customer experience and provide targeted coaching, no matter where their employees are working.

With hiring more difficult than ever, leading contact centers recognize that customer satisfaction and retention relates directly to agent experience and are prioritizing agent upskilling over the next few years. This inside-out growth strategy depends on empowering agents to always work on improving their skills in order to keep moving up through the organization.

Calabrio QM’s built-in gamification tools provide incentives and award badges to inspire competition, reinforce positive behaviors, and drive skill growth. Really, though, these tools help foster a tighter community culture in the contact center and those relationships are important to engaging agents and keeping them with the company.

Speed + Flexibility

Though a contact center may be losing the battle of agent attrition, it is possible to evolve quickly to give employees the freedom and tools they need to thrive and stay. Calabrio and Amazon have worked together to decrease attrition. Calabrio is the only enterprise-grade, true cloud WFO solution on the market and when implemented with Amazon Connect on AWS’s platform they can help keep contact center employees around.

GE Appliances did just that. The implementation took mere days. It was so quick and seamless, in fact, that some internal stakeholders didn’t even know it had taken place. However, raking through key metrics after the implementation, they discovered cost per call decreased by 15%, adherence grew by 20%, the cost of hiring went down when attrition shrank by 25%. The WFM and QM solutions provided scalability and flexibility of the cloud—allowing their entire contact center to move to a remote model in just days.

“The seamless integration of Calabrio ONE and Amazon Connect empowers our joint customers to manage their workforces efficiently. Placing the right employees, in the right places, at the right times is critical to modern workforces—made possible with these digital-native and cloud-born solutions.” Shalima Bhalla, Global Lead, Strategic Partnerships & Alliances, Amazon Web Services

Now, GE Appliances can scale its contact center up or down as needed, instantaneously, on-demand. And since contact center agents can work remotely, they can hire agents anywhere, and limit stress on their current agents by allowing them the flexibility to work wherever they choose.

Agent Experience = Customer Experience

When contact center agents are stressed out, the customers they interact with can tell. This can create a cycle of irritation that ends, likely, with the loss of a customer. Calabrio’s data shows that two or three negative customer service interactions will cause customers to switch to another brand.

Agent wellbeing, then, seems to be a reflection of the business as a whole. If the agent is suffering, the customer suffers, which leads to loss of revenue. Investing in contact center agents is cost-effective. It will heighten customer experience, decrease agent attrition, and foster growth from the inside out.

Deploying Calabrio and Amazon cloud solutions is the quickest way to combat agent attrition and lower operating costs. The scalability and flexibility of the cloud makes it possible to empower agents and turn a lagging contact center around in no time. Learn more about the partnership at calabrio.com/amazon-connect.