As a business, it is essential to have an excellent communication with clients. This communication is the backbone for creating loyalty for your products and services.

Building a successful call center team, through hiring, training and retaining agents, is crucial to achieving the desired performance. However, call center agents often have many options related to their skills, knowledge, and experience, resulting in higher attrition rates.

The continuous training program may decrease the customer experience, and the need for the agents to start a new learning curve. Managers usually don’t think about these aspects unless they work in the HR department.

In the call center industry, to prepare a fully trained agent usually takes up to 2 to 4 months. Keep in mind that you require both agents and supervisors to help your organization control its KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

During the learning curve, clients usually suffer because unskilled agents may take longer to solve their problems; this leads to longer waiting times, more time spent on the phone, or even wasting an entire afternoon trying to fix a simple problem that an instructed agent could quickly solve.

What can we do to reduce attrition rates?

It depends on the Call Center, its core values, its selection during the hiring process, and the training and retention plans that will ensure keeping loyal and proficient agents in each campaign.

Let’s consider each one of the main aspects:

• Core Values: Agents are looking for good working conditions, a flexible schedule, a good working environment, great leadership, and of course, good salaries. This is when the company’s core values are necessary, to secure equal conditions for all the agents, growth opportunities, and of course, a clear career path that may follow.
• Hiring Process: Each account is unique and requires certain skills that people may have or not. They can develop these skills over time; however, it is important to select the best candidate. They already have developed these skills, making the Training Process easier.
• Training: Not all the candidates will complete the training, and also not all of them will be suited for a certain campaign. The Call Center must train a higher number of candidates than the requested by the clients. This will guarantee the fulfillment of the required seats.
• Ramping Up: Is a process that needs to take into account the training and selection process, to avoid creating queues of clients needing the help of an overwhelmed team of agents.
• Retention: Keeping the knowledge on the site is important, by providing good working conditions, programs and careers for the agents is the best way to ensure retention. There is a bonus and also activities to promote the retention of agents, but nothing works better than a good salary. This needs to be taken into account by the Call Center and the Client.

In conclusion, managing a Call Center is a challenge, both for the service provider and the client. Communication is key to keeping the operations running smoothly and creating the desired results with the end client. It is all about Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, and above all, generating the desired profits. If you are looking for a team of experts to run your Call Center operation, Callsite Solutions is for you. You may schedule a free consultation to get started.