Employee turnover is one of the most wasteful yearly occurrences in any business. And in today’s world, it has become an increasingly recurring part of daily life.

An article by Forbes even called 2021 a “Turnover Tsunami” and given the data emerging from Vieser citing 1 in 4 Americans will quit their job by the end of 2021, it’s easy to see why. Data from the US Bureau of Labor agrees with this, claiming over 4 million people quit their jobs in April 2021 alone.

To an extent, employee turnover is perfectly natural. Employees come and go, things change, and sometime’s the fit just isn’t right. Still, the loss of employees is incredibly costly for a business. Time and money are required to train replacements that initially can’t provide the same output as experienced employees.

A LinkedIn article by Josh Bersin from Deloitte says that the cost of this can be anything from tens of thousands of dollars to almost double the employee’s annual salary. The Work Institute claims that the cost of employee turnover is more than 30% of the employee’s salary. Something the Employee Benefit News agrees with, citing 33% of a worker’s annual salary.

Either way, this is a worrying statistic. As the United States goes through what is being called the Great Resignation ( The Achievers Employee Engagement and Retention Report claims over 52% of workers sought new jobs in 2021 alone), employee turnover is well worth reducing.

7 Easy Ways to Reduce Employee Turnover

Employee turnover is not just an irritation for employers, it can and does add up to a waste financially. Given the frequency of Millenials and Gen Z changing jobs, it is becoming an increasing priority.

To help your company retain its increasingly valuable employees, read on for 7 Ways to Reduce Employee Turnover.

1. Hire Smart

Choosing the right people for the job is probably the most important aspect of reducing employee turnover. If you choose to employ people who don’t fit your company culture or dynamics, not only will they be unhappy and likely to leave, but you’ll have wasted your time and theirs trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

Data-driven recruitment helps you hire the best people for precisely that reason. Taking a holistic and analytic approach to hiring, it can cut down on hiring costs, up experiences with prospective employees, and overall improve the quality pool from which you hire. It can also help your recruiters cut down or at least better direct HR when they make hiring decisions “from the gut”.

While experience and qualifications are important, they’re not the only things that matter. There’s a lot to be said for focusing on soft skills and hiring smart, versatile people with innate talent that can fit into various roles in your business.

Employees who have the same values and goals as your company are crucial. Not only do they immediately fit in, feel attached to, and want the best for the company but they actively contribute to good and healthy work culture.

2. Reward and Recognize

Recognition and rewarding hard work are two of an employer’s largest tools when it comes to reducing employee turnover.

Recognizing employee efforts frequently ranks as a crucial component of what matters to employees.

Undervalued employees can quickly become bitter and unhappy whenever they feel their work has gone unnoticed. A survey by Globoforce and SHRM reported that 90% of employees reported feeling more satisfied with their work when rewarded with peer-to-peer recognition.

Rewarding employees can take many forms whether this is financial in terms of bonuses or outings, additional time off, gifts, or some sort of personal incentive based on something unique you know that employee will appreciate.

One of the more unique ways to reward your employees is donation matching. This is a type of donation where a business matches employee donations to nonprofits and charities. This is a great way to reward an employee while rewarding great causes in the community – especially if you offer to double or triple that employee’s contribution!

3. Promote work-life balance

Balancing the work-life boundary is becoming an increasingly important factor for employees.

Traditionally, work can be an all-encompassing facet of life. Whether that’s a result of grind culture due to low wages, poor management, incessant emails, and the insistence that one be available nearly 24/7 should issue at work arise. The desire to succeed or not be seen as a bad employee can often exacerbate these issues.

The idea that you should live to work rather than work to live is proving to be a quickly antiquated notion. Millennials and Gen Z, more than ever, are choosing to prioritize their work-life balance and will often leave a job rather than compromise on their leisure time. Research from Hubspot corroborates.

If your employees feel they are living to work, rather than working to live, there’s a major possibility you’ll experience employee turnover.

4. Offer a comprehensive competitive benefits package

It should go without saying that employers that offer competitive salaries lead to happier employees. That in turn reduces employee turnover as happy employees stay.

One component that cannot be ignored is having equally competitive benefits packages. And that’s not just avocado toast or ping pong tables.

Between the 2008 Recession and COVID 19, Millennials and Gen Z employees are increasingly financially aware and are looking to find companies that can offer them robust benefits.

A study by the Lincoln Financial Group backs this up. According to that study, 57% of Millenials say that they’ve stayed at a job they didn’t like because of the benefits package. 93% of Gen Z say that being offered a great benefits package would make them stay longer at their first full-time job.

Here are a few things for employers to focus on when creating their benefits packages:

• Health Insurance
• 401K Pans with accompanying benefits
• Paid Time Off
• Dental Insurance
• Financial Counseling
• Tuition Support

5. Show your respect

“Respect is a two-way street.”

We’ve all heard it before. What’s often forgotten is that one of those lanes comes from the direction of management. Shouting, screaming and unrealistic demands can create a corrosive atmosphere and one that’s almost impossible to recover from.

Mutual respect is just good management. Employees will work harder for managers for who they feel respect and obligation toward. That inherent sense of trust, mutual collaboration, commitment, and a good work atmosphere is crucial in any work environment.

A few basic points to remember that might help both parties with this includes:

• Treat people the way you’d want to be treated
• Remain calm and keep it professional
• Learn the difference between constructive and corrosive criticism
• Keep an open mind and attitude toward other’s ideas
• Make employees feel valued, heard, and seen.
• Communicate, communicate and communicate.

In addition to the above, providing a clean working environment for your employees by having a reputable cleaning company clean your offices regularly is also highly recommended. It will not only help improve your employee’s well-being but can also result in improved overall productivity.

Ultimately this will lead to increased rates of retention for employees.

6. Offer flexible work schedules

With remote work coming to the forefront of society since COVID 19 became a global pandemic, it’s safe to say remote work is here to stay.

While it may have been initially seen as a temporary measure, more and more companies are offering hybrid work options as well as fully remote jobs. Adobe, Amazon, Facebook, and Hubspot are just a few of the world’s top companies looking at going either fully remote or increasingly hybrid. In fact, according to Future Workforce Report, 32 million Americans will be working remotely by 2025.

That’s no surprise given the benefits attached to remote work. Increased productivity, schedule flexibility, reduced costs of commute and the near erasure of unnecessary meetings are all almost immediate benefits of remote work.

Glassdoors Economic Research Report confirms that job seekers in today’s economy are increasingly interested in remote jobs. According to their research, searches for remote positions increased by 360% from June 2019 to June 2021.

Employers need to not only take into account these trends but figure out the best way to go about recruiting and structuring their remote teams to fully benefit from this.

7. Develop a robust Onboarding process

The onboarding process in a company is an often overlooked part of what goes into not only settling in new employees but making sure that these employees settle in well.

Good onboarding can make an employee feel welcome, informed, and aware of the workplace culture and values and make them feel at ease in their new environment. This translates into loyalty which then leads to lower rates of employee turnover. A recent report found that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with their company for at least 3 years if they’ve had a great onboarding process.

Onboarding is a company’s first opportunity to make a good impression. If it seems like the culture of the company isn’t quite right, employees will quickly start seeking new opportunities.

Bad onboarding looks something like dropping a new employee in the office with no clue and leaving them to find their way around. Good onboarding, on the other hand, involves mentor pairing, introductions, explanation of tools as well as regular checking in and providing support.

As obvious as it sounds, bad onboarding is a mistake a lot of managers make that could have you having to find new hires sooner rather than later.

Final Thoughts

With Millenials and Gen Z increasingly choosing to prioritize their health and happiness over pay or job security, employees are experiencing increased employee turnover. As the US and indeed the world, experience the “Great Resignation” keeping the employees you have is crucial to a successful business.

Between the loss of productivity as new hires acquire skills your old employees already had, the waste of time training these replacements, and the actual cost of recruiting, interviewing, and hiring new employees, employee turnover can have a greater impact on your business than you expected.

While it may sound like doom and gloom, the truth is quite the opposite. Reducing employee turnover is a lot simpler than it seems. Oftentimes, all it takes is a few conscious and purposeful tweaks to your company policy. Whether it’s increasing your flexibility with employees working from home, offering comprehensive benefits packages or even just being more respectful towards your employees.

These qualities will reduce your employee turnover as well as make you a good “People Company” which will allow you to not just become more productive but more successful. The truth is that the more you value your employees and show them that, the more likely they’ll want to remain and grow with your company.

And that’s just good business.

DHL Supply Chain, the world’s leading contract logistics provider, is accelerating its business expansion to meet a boom in demand for its services, while simultaneously increasing agent retention to a record high, with the help of a suite of Avaya OneCloud technologies.

The solution, with AI-powered contact centre to manage workloads, has helped DHL raise its number of concurrent agents to 300%, with its retention rate significantly increasing.

Based in Singapore, DHL Contact Centre Services provides logistics solutions across a range of industries, including service logistics, technology, and public agencies. The Covid-19 pandemic created more opportunity to better support its customers’ increasing demand for fast and cost-effective contact centre services.

“As many businesses found during the pandemic, the last 18 months were characterized by a huge spike in demand for high-quality customer experience services. Between 2019 and today, alongside the rollout of Avaya OneCloud, our number of concurrent agents has increased 300 percent,” said Jerome Gillet, CEO, Singapore Cluster, DHL Supply Chain. “Retention in the contact centre industry has been a challenge for several years. With the support of a comprehensive, cloud-based collaboration tool, and an AI-powered contact centre, our retention rate has significantly increased to become the best-in-class in the industry.”

“The security and scalability of the product means we can replicate this customer service environment in other markets, enabling contact centre agents to log in from anywhere, at any time, and gain access to the communication and collaboration capabilities,” Gillet added. “In the near future, we will be scaling our contact centre offering to Japan, Korea, Australia, Malaysia and the Philippines.”

“DHL Supply Chain is oiling the wheels of businesses during an essential time, allowing it to meet demands that have only accelerated during and after the pandemic,” said Stephen Spears, Avaya Chief Revenue Officer. “Cloud-based customer service capabilities, automation and knowledge management are combining to deliver these offerings at a much quicker rate while supporting those charged with providing the service.”

Find out more about the partnership between DHL Supply Chain and Avaya and how we helped them grow: https://bit.ly/3m3K010

About the Author

Steve Joyner is Vice President at Avaya UK and Ireland at Avaya at Avaya.

The Great Resignation is a topic receiving plenty of attention in 2021 and for good reason.

According to one Gallup poll, nearly 50 percent of America’s working population was actively job searching or monitoring job opportunities this past summer. Employee engagement is even worse, as 34 percent of North American respondents in the poll said they were actively engaged in their current job. Unfortunately, in customer service settings, these sentiments affect much more than employee happiness or turnover—often impacting customer interactions and even customer satisfaction with your brand.

Let’s face it, customer-facing employees have the power to tarnish your brand or enhance your brand, which should make keeping them engaged and productive a critical part of your organization’s internal business objectives. Yet, we continue to see important initiatives that fall under the employee experience (EX) umbrella fall to the wayside in favor of operational enhancements that do little to improve the employee experience and, in turn, drive deeper employee engagement.

It’s important to keep in mind that every emerging customer experience challenge we are trying to solve in the post-pandemic digital world reflects a similar employee experience challenge. For customers, you aim to deliver seamless digital journeys that can help customers navigate the digital sales cycle. For employees, you might need to reimagine the onboarding or recruiting journey to better serve a remote workforce’s expectations.

Now for the good news. Due to the shared pain points customers and employees are facing in the post-pandemic world, there is a wealth of proven CX strategies readily available to help your organization solve the employee turnover crisis and re-engage your workforce. As a CX consultant with decades of experience in contact center solutions, Avtex has a unique viewpoint to the changing landscape of both CX and EX best practices. If your organization is ready to begin aligning your employee experience with the new world of work, here a few quick strategies you can use to get started:

1. Understand Your Employee Journey—When it comes to marketing a product, the customer journey is an integral factor in deciding which touchpoints and messages make sense for a specific customer in a specific moment. The same is true for your employees. Not every employee has the same experience or the same role, which means they will likely need different levels and types of support during onboarding and across their day-to-day duties. Take the time to execute an employee journey mapping exercise that can help you uncover the personas found throughout your organization. Then use these to build out the right set of touchpoints to make their experience engaging and productive from the beginning. And don’t forget about the employee lifecycle too. Just like a customer, your employees’ needs will change over time. Think about how you can build in career growth and upskilling opportunities that demonstrate an understanding of their long-term goals.

2. Provide the Right Tools to Empower Employee Success—In the CX world, omnichannel strategies allow customers to move quickly through customer service interactions with the right speed and level of touch they require. The key here is the seamless orchestration between each one of these channels that makes true omnichannel engagement possible. For the employee experience, tool selection for the modern world of work is equally important. From a collaboration and communication perspective, cloud-based solutions present an obvious advantage for remote and hybrid work environments. But, beyond these frontline solutions that powered the early work-from-home, organizations should also reconsider many of their longstanding tools as well—such as CRM and data management platforms. By integrating the right mix of APIs and add-ons, employers have a powerful opportunity to shift routine tasks off their employees’ to-do list via automation and machine learning, which can empower them to prioritize the high-touch interactions that help close a new sale or wow an existing customer. Creating more interactive data-sharing solutions can also help create more informed customer interactions by bringing the right customer data to every engagement.

3. Listen to your Employees and Create a Feedback Loop to Promote Long-Term Alignment—Your employees know exactly what they need to best serve the customer. So, while both of the first two strategies listed here represent useful approaches to play “catch up” or build an employee experience that meets existing needs, remember these needs aren’t static. It’s also critical to stay in tune with employee expectations moving forward. After all, failure to maintain alignment with employees is partially to blame for the current wave of resignations. There is a number of ways to do this, but developing an official Voice of the Employee (VoE) is a great place to start. The best VoE programs integrate a mix of employee surveys, active listening, and reward programs to both standardize and incentivize routine feedback that can help identify common pain points that take place across the full employee experience and remedy them before they create a turnover problem.

4. Build a Culture of Recognition, Reward, and Respect—In the midst of building pressure to do more to remedy staff shortages and employee stress, it is more important than ever to recognize individual contributions. Even those tasks that might be considered a normal expectation of the job have become increasingly difficult for a myriad of different external reasons outside of the employees’ control. As a result, make sure you provide recognition for above-and-beyond service to customers to A) show that you are paying attention and B) demonstrate that you don’t take great customer service for granted. Finally, show deep respect for employees’ points of view, opinions, and ideas. If you want to grow and sustain employee engagement fostering a culture of respect can have an immeasurable payback.

Improving or transforming your employee experience is often easier than you might think. In many cases, relatively small changes can have a tremendous impact on the day-to-day satisfaction and engagement of your employees. When your CX and EX strategies work in unison, you’ll quickly recognize that your organization can take customer service to new heights.

About the Author

Kurt Schroeder is the Chief Experience Officer and leader of CX consulting practice at Avtex, a full-service CX consulting and solution provider focused on helping organizations create better experiences for customers. Avtex partners with leading technology vendors like Microsoft and Genesys to address CX challenges through CX design and orchestration. Kurt and his team help organizations thrive in the experience economy by creating meaningful experiences in every interaction. Kurt has pioneered methodologies and approaches to customer experience over 30 years for companies in financial services, agriculture, manufacturing, health care, distribution, insurance, consumer packaged goods and non-profits, including GE, 3M, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, United Health Group, numerous credit unions and manufacturers.

Over five million people globally work as call centre agents, including 1.3 million people in the UK. Many of them face challenges according to a new research report from artificial intelligence (AI) firm ASAPP, CX: The Human Factor.

Training, coaching, legacy technology, and lack of career opportunities top the list of issues for agents along with handling irate customers.

Training/Coaching

A recurrent response by agents is that they want to be empowered to help customers. It’s a mentally challenging job being on the front line of helping people. We count on agents for assistance with a broad array of consumer needs including technology, healthcare, housing, finance, utilities, entertainment, travel, and internet access. However, the world of agents has also been complicated by legacy technology that has driven more complexity in agents’ roles.

Training is a major cost for the industry and CX leaders often deal with 40% agent churn. 51% of poorly trained agents are pessimistic about their careers—an outlook that can lead to poor performance, unhappy customers, and agent burnout—yet 61% of agents who received good training felt optimistic.

While companies often look at ways to reduce the time it takes to train agents, the report suggests reduced training lowers the confidence and competence of agents, which can lead to higher absenteeism. There is room for change with the use of AI that learns from tenured agents’ work and uses that information to train new hires with practical and credible training. This ability to shorten the learning curve and get agents ready to be “on-the-floor,” is cause for optimism.

The call centre industry is metric driven with a culture of continuous improvement. Nevertheless, 78% of agents report metric manipulation. The challenge is that agents want to serve people, but they are not being served themselves by current metrics, which measure a fraction of their overall customer interactions and don’t provide a real picture of their work.
The most common reasons agents cite as cause for metric manipulation are:

• 33% Compensation Bonus
• 27% Managerial Pressures
• 21% Quotas

While 63% of agents report feedback is helpful and encouraging, 27% of agents say it doesn’t reflect their overall work—and 37% reported that it has been difficult to get feedback during the pandemic. When agents receive a bad CSAT review in real-time, the metric creates negativity and anxiety, especially when it’s unrepresentative of their work. This anxiety can have an outsized impact on absenteeism—itself a metric of the customer experience.

With AI, the industry has an opportunity to modernize technology and reduce anxiety, as it can extract data and analysis from every customer interaction to provide the analytics the agents and company needs. Additionally, AI now enables the ability for coaching and support, alerting and enabling supervisors in real-time to an agent’s need for help with difficult calls.

The Technology Gap

There is a strong relationship between the degree an agent finds the technology at their company to be satisfactory or sufficient, and how happy they are on the job. Therefore, investments in new technology are important for retaining a workforce. 45% of agents believe that technology advancement in call centres is behind the times. 37% cited current technology doesn’t help them complete tasks faster or doesn’t do what they want it to do and a further 43% experiencing their systems crashing or freezing.

51% of agents believe AI will help solve customer’s repetitive problems and 44% agree that AI will improve their efficiency.

Yet, automation should not be exclusively about eliminating human involvement. Native AI platforms can automate a customer’s journey up front and throughout a call. During the call itself, AI is supporting an agent through complex workflows for each interaction. This end-to-end, AI-empowered system is making people more effective, efficient, and shortening the time required by an agent to make their work-lives easier.

Unfortunately, most automation deployed today is poorly designed, limited in reach and yields a bad customer experience. People are this industry’s most valuable resource and ensuring they have the best technology, tools, and training to cope with the challenging demands of customer service is critical.

Customer Challenges

Irate customers have been a subject in the industry for a long time and the report indicates that:

• 81% of agent respondents have experienced verbal abuse
• 36% of agent respondents have been threatened with violence
• 21% of female agents and 9% of male agent respondents have been sexually harassed

There are signs of change and technology now exists for companies to tackle this problem at scale. With artificial intelligence it is now possible to transcribe calls in real-time, flag abusive calls and notify supervisors. It’s a tough topic to address for the industry but one that is central to agents’ well-being, particularly with employee attrition. Yet, the overwhelming majority (90%) of agents stated that calls with customers made their day.

Reduce Complexity of Calls

Pulitzer-prize writer James Michener said, “there are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.” 72% of agents want to solve simple customer problems, yet during the pandemic customer engagement reached a pinnacle of long wait times and complexity due to massive increases in inbound call volumes, reduced agent availability and technology systems not designed for the work from home environment.

Four tasks were listed by agents for taking the longest time:

1. Asking for a customer’s information
2. Searching for answers to customer questions in the company’s knowledge system.
3. Writing summary notes of the call
4. Requesting support from a manager

However, with the right use of AI, all these tasks can be automated to simplify and reduce the call time.

Today’s call centre challenges are not just about technology and managing costs. It’s also about brand, reputation and delivering a high-quality experience. On the positive side, if companies engage customers where they are and provide anytime, anywhere service convenience (even in social channels), the customer experience can be a powerful voice for the brand, a core part of a company’s strategy and value proposition, and most importantly, customer lifetime value.

How supervisors manage customer conflict also determines how long employees stick around.

Whether they’re dealing with impatient diners at a restaurant, handling returns at a clothing store or appeasing angry consumers at a call center, anyone working in the service industry will tell you: it’s a tough gig.

In fact, studies have shown that dealing with problematic customers can lead to emotional exhaustion, negative moods, poorer physical health, reduced performance and lower job satisfaction.

But does it also lead to higher employee turnover?

According to a new study led by the UBC Sauder School of Business in collaboration with the UBC-Okanagan Faculty of Management, the University of Illinois, and the University of Queensland in Australia, customer conflict plays a big role when it comes to workers saying “I quit” — and how supervisors manage that conflict helps decide whether employees stay or go.

The study, entitled Unpacking the Relationship Between Customer (In)Justice and Employee Turnover Outcomes: Can Fair Supervisor Treatment Reduce Employees’ Emotional Turmoil?, involved 420 retail workers and 363 restaurant employees in the Philippines, as well as 940 call center employees in Canada. The researchers measured the workers’ experience of customer mistreatment and its emotional effects, as well as their quit rates.

Even when controlling for other factors that would lead a worker to throw in the towel — factors including low pay, long hours and poor working conditions — the researchers found a significant link between customer mistreatment and employee quit rates.

“We were able to predict who was going to quit based on their experience of customer mistreatment and emotional exhaustion. You can see it coming,” says UBC Sauder School of Business professor Danielle van Jaarsveld, lead author of the study.

“It starts accumulating, and eventually you hit the wall and say, ‘I’ve got to look for another job.’ Because if you don’t find a way to replenish those emotional resources, they deplete and you’ve got nothing left,” says study co-author and UBC Sauder School of Business professor Daniel Skarlicki.

But it turns out that how supervisors respond to front-line customer service staff can make a big difference when it comes to employee retention. When the surveyed workers felt their supervisors treated them with dignity and respect, listened to their concerns, and supported them when dealing with demanding customers, they were far more likely to stick around.

“Whether you quit isn’t just about the customer; it’s what’s called an interaction effect — that is, the customer mistreatment is buffered when the manager treats you fairly,” explains Skarlicki. “So if you get berated by a customer and your boss says ‘that’s disrespectful, I’m going to support you,’ it reduces the effect of that customer mistreatment.”

This study is one of the first to examine the effect customer injustice has on workers’ decisions about whether or not to stay in the job, and adds to the extensive existing research on how employees’ interactions with their coworkers and supervisors affect churn rates.

The findings are important because, especially in the age of social media, online reviews and razor-thin margins, customer service quality can make or break a business — and in the service industry, turnover rates can range from 26 to 200 percent.

They can also come with a high financial cost. According to Skarlicki, in one company, turnover attributed to bad management can cost a company more than $300,000 in a single year — and that’s not taking into account the customer dissatisfaction that invariably comes with a constantly shifting workforce, and the effect of the customer dissatisfaction on the company’s reputation.

“Even though companies know these difficult encounters happen, the effect of customer mistreatment on turnover is huge — and these are really significant effects,” he says. “People think employees quit primarily because of factors like salary and workload, but it’s also about how they’re treated by customers and supervisors.”

Skarlicki says companies that rely on customer service can reduce turnover by ensuring supervisors treat the employees with dignity and respect, having regular conversations with their employees, and training employees on how to deal with abusive customers.

“We know that employees don’t leave companies; they leave managers. Our findings support this mantra,” emphasizes Skarlicki, who says too many customer service managers focus solely on employee productivity. “Companies should make sure managers are going from employee to employee checking in on how they are dealing with the potential stress that can come from difficult customers. Although this may seem like common sense, common sense doesn’t equal common practice.”

About the Author

Unpacking the Relationship Between Customer (In)Justice and Employee Turnover Outcomes: Can Fair Supervisor Treatment Reduce Employees’ Emotional Turmoil? was authored by Danielle D. van Jaarsveld, Daniel Skarlicki, and Pascale H. Frické of the UBC Sauder School of Business, David D. Walker of the UBC-Okanagan Faculty of Management, Simon Lloyd D. Restubog of the University of Queensland and Yueyang Chen of the University of Illinois. The study is forthcoming in the Journal of Service Research.

It is necessary in this economic climate to develop stronger relationships that create a long-term backbone for the company.

During the nineties, consumer confidence and spending were so strong that consulting firms were often hired without an in-depth credential check and the assurance that their corporate culture aligned with the hiring organizations’.

Furthermore, profits were so high at that time that many companies settled for satisfied customers, rather than truly engaged customers. Things have changed.

Now, with consumers spending less and competitors slashing prices, organizations are more prudent with the choices they make when selecting professional services firms. They are beginning to understand it is more important than ever to create sustaining relationships with employees and customers. Because of this professional service firms need to incorporate these measures to ensure business success.

View on Relationships

Customer retention/loyalty consistently ranks high in compiled lists of CEOs’ top concerns. Furthermore, our research on engagement has proven that a company’s financial health is directly tied to how well they engage employees and customers.

In this economy it’s especially important for organizations to build stronger relationships to retain current customers. To do so, they must work to engage both employees and customers. Professional service firms that understand that long-term profitability depends on exceptional customer service leading to fully engaged customers will have greater success.

View on Employees

Excellent customer service begins with engaged employees. When customer-facing employees are passionate about providing unparalleled service, customers are more likely to enjoy their interaction with your company. Engaged employees positively impact your company’s productivity as they win over fully engaged customers.

How should engaged employees be defined? First and foremost, they should be characterized by their loyalty. Engaged employees will stay with their current employer because they are passionate about their job. They feel appreciated at work, and they’re sure management values their opinions. Engaged employees will also put extra effort into their work. If asked about their job, they will recommend the company they work for.

It is extremely important to engage the employees who are delivering the customer experience. When these employees are engaged, their passion and genuine dedication to their work win over and create engaged customers. And engaged customers are willing to buy more and recommend your business to others. Employee engagement is pivotal across industries, but is especially crucial in service industries, including banking, hotels, retail, and dining. In these environments, employees interact with customers on a daily basis and shape customers’ perceptions and attitudes.

Employee engagement analysis is most often conducted in business environments with high “best practices” expectations, multi-level reporting of consumer concerns, and in-place mechanisms for employee feedback. Your employees are a rich source of ideas on how to improve your company’s procedures, since they are on the front lines of customer service.

View on Customers

Engaged customers have a lot in common with the engaged employees that they interact with regularly. At a basic level, customer engagement measures the emotional connection between a consumer and a company or brand. We define engaged customers according to the following characteristics:

• Retention: Given the choice, Engaged Customers would choose to do business again with a specific company.
• Effort: Engaged Customers go out of their way to do business with their favorite companies.
• Advocacy: Engaged Customers recommend their favorite companies to friends.
• Passion: Engaged Customers love doing business with their favorite companies.

Customers with these characteristics bring higher ROI and profits. Companies with high levels of customer engagement outperform the average for their industry, as our Most Engaged Customer Study shows.

Creating Engaged Employees and Customers

In addition to capturing employee feedback discussed above, organizations should also be proactive in gathering customer feedback. A customer-centric culture begins with obtaining transaction-based feedback. There are an array of techniques for gathering feedback, including surveys, BlogTrak, which tracks both negative and positive posts from consumers, and one-on-one customer service follow-ups.

Customer feedback will help your organization make appropriate changes, but it will also have an immediate impact on two things: Helps you win back customers who have had negative experiences as quickly as possible. Enables you to identify and recognize extraordinary employees who have gone “above and beyond” expectations to wow the customer.

Businesses need more than simple data to improve their employee relationships and grow customer loyalty. It is necessary in this economic climate to gather information you can take action on to develop relationships that create a stronger, long-term backbone for the company.

About the Author

PeopleMetrics, an engagement professional service for employee and customer interaction, helps companies interested in creating positive customer engagements as a long-term, affective business strategy.

In almost every call center across the USA, employee retention is a hot topic.

In fact, the average annual turnover rate has risen to 50%.

According to a survey by New York-based William M. Mercer Inc., 45% of companies report turnover costs of more than $10,000 per employee. One-fifth of respondents estimate costs at more than $30,000 for each lost worker.

The entire recruitment process can prove to be a very costly undertaking as resources and time are put into recruitment (which would include advertising the job), interviews and testing, orientation and training. Not only is turnover expensive, it also decreases employee morale.

However, there are ways that you can ensure that your call centre does not get hit with those high attrition rates:

(1) Revamp Your Hiring Strategy

One of the problems with turnover in a call center is that prospective employees don’t know what they are getting themselves into. Employees are hired; they attend orientation, and then spend a few weeks in training. After training, they hit the floor, and realize that the job is nothing like they expected.

According to a recent study on hiring costs at 54 Fortune 1,000 companies, hiring the wrong call center representative often costs nearly 26 times the average salary.

We have to make sure that that we get it right the first time.

– Don’t hire based on a gut feeling.

– Be proactive by conducting pre-hire screens and test for skills, attitudes and behaviors required for the job.

– Give prospective employees a realistic job preview.

(2) Abolish the Boring Call Center Factor

Most employees in a call centre spend most of their time on the phones. Most centers require that you take anywhere from forty to a hundred calls per day.

Let’s face it, after doing the same thing all day, every day, the job can get boring, and, if you’re not careful, the work environment of your call center can be similar to that of a sweatshop.

– Create a fun atmosphere by having frequent special events.

– Make the job more fulfilling: Enlarge the job by giving more responsibility.

– Offer Job rotation by involving agents in engaging and challenging off-phone tasks and projects

(3) Manage Employee Performance and Encourage Employee Development

One of the problems with the average call center job is that most employees view it as, well, just a job. In a survey conducted by the Customer Group LLC, the number one reason that employees left the job was that there was no career path.

– Adopt a system where employees are required to select a career path.

– Encourage call centre agents to shadow employees who are currently in their goal position.

(4) Recognize and Reward

A little bit of recognition can go a long way. Employees who are happy at work and feel appreciated are more likely to be more dedicated to their work. Employees should feel like they are more than a voice answering the phones.

– Recognize and track the employees’ performance along the way.

– Offer both cash and non financial incentives such as awards and gift certificates.

– Adopt a pay for performance compensation system.

About the Author

Sharlah-Ann Beckford MHR, PHR is Client Manager at Aon Hewitt.