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 a tight labor market, both your business and its customers cannot afford to lose agents. The cost and time to hire is too high—and the potential loss in service quality too damaging. So, it is imperative that organizations take steps to combat contact center agent attrition and implement strategies to retain talent.
But where to begin? This guide will help you understand the scope of contact center agent attrition issues, explore underlying causes, and—most importantly—provide you with real world-tested ways to reduce agent turnover and keep your best employees around.
Let’s dive in and discover how to keep your call center staffed with engaged, and high-performing agents that deliver exceptional experiences.
Call Center Attrition Rates: Understanding the Problem
Before we dive into solutions, it’s crucial to understand the scope and underlying drivers of call center attrition. What exactly does it mean, how is it measured, and what are the current industry trends?
Defining and Measuring Call Center Attrition and Turnover
While often used interchangeably, there’s a subtle difference between “attrition” and “turnover.”
- Attrition generally refers to employees leaving the company voluntarily or involuntarily (e.g., resignation, termination, retirement) and not being replaced. This results in a net loss of employees.
- Turnover, or employee churn, encompasses all employee departures, including those who are replaced. It represents the overall rate of employee change within the call center.
To track and analyze these important dynamics at your contact center, you need a clear method for calculating them.
Call Center Attrition Rate Formula
To measure attrition, use this formula:
Attrition Rate = (Number of Agents Who Left and Were NOT Replaced / Average Number of Agents) x 100
To break the attrition rate formula down further:
- Number of Agents Who Left: This is the key difference from turnover. It only counts employees who left the contact center and were not replaced during a specific period (e.g., a month, quarter, or year).
- Average Number of Agents: Calculate the average number of agents employed during that same period.
Call Center Turnover Rate Formula
To track turnover, use this formula:
Turnover Rate = (Number of Agents Who Left During a Period / Average Number of Agents During that Period) x 100
Let’s break that down as well:
- Number of Agents Who Left During a Period: This includes all departures (voluntary or involuntary) within a specific timeframe (e.g., a month, quarter, or year).
- Average Number of Agents During that Period: Calculate the average number of agents employed during the same timeframe.
To illustrate, if you had 500 agents at the start of the year, 400 at the end of the year, and 200 total agents left during the year:
- Your average number of agents would be (500+400)/2 = 450.
- Your call center’s turnover rate would be (200/450) x 100 = 44%
- Now, let’s say you were unable to replace 80 of those agents in total. Your call center’s attrition rate would be (80/450) x 100 = 78%.
By calculating the rates of agent turnover and attrition, you can not only understand changes in your workforce composition over time but also compare your trends to others across the industry.
Call Center Industry Turnover Rate Benchmarks
Call center turnover rates are notoriously high compared to other industries. And employee churn among new hires can be especially high. Contact center industry averages vary. However, one study found that, in 2022, the average turnover rate reached as high as 38%. Depending on the type of work performed, typical benchmarks range from as low as 15% to 45%, or even higher.
High turnover at contact centers poses a significant challenge for workforce management, training, and maintaining service consistency.
Crucially, it can also be incredibly costly. According to one estimate, it can cost up to $20,000 on average to replace a single contact center agent. Between real costs and opportunity costs—turnover in talent can add up in a big way. Moreover, high turnover can—and often does—lead to increased attrition rates, which can put the entire operation at risk.
This is why using benchmarks and your own measurements to assess your performance and identify areas for improvement is so critical. Without a recognition of the problem, you will be less capable of stopping it.
The Top Causes of Call Center Agent Attrition & Employee Turnover
To effectively combat agent attrition, it’s also essential to understand the root causes driving agents away. Here are some of the most common causes:
- Burnout and Stress: The demanding nature of call center work, with high call volumes, challenging customer interactions, and strict performance metrics, can lead to high levels of stress and, ultimately, burnout.
- Lack of Recognition and Appreciation: Agents who feel undervalued and unappreciated are more likely to seek opportunities elsewhere.
- Limited Growth Opportunities: A lack of clear career development options and advancement potential can demotivate agents and contribute to turnover.
- Poor Work-Life Balance: Inflexible schedules, long hours, and difficulty managing personal life can lead to agent dissatisfaction and attrition.
- Inadequate Compensation and Benefits: Uncompetitive salaries and benefits packages can make agents feel undervalued and more likely to leave.
- Lack of Support and Communication: Poor communication from management, inadequate support, and a lack of feedback can create a negative work environment.
- Ineffective Coaching and Training: Insufficient training and development opportunities can hinder agent performance and job satisfaction.
- Outdated Technology: Outdated or inefficient technology can frustrate agents and hinder their productivity.
9 Ways to Combat Call Center Agent Attrition
Reducing agent attrition is crucial for maintaining a stable and productive call center environment. Here are nine actionable strategies to address the root causes of turnover and improve agent retention:
1. Start Things Off Right
First impressions matter. Build a strong foundation for agent retention with a positive and engaging hiring and onboarding process. To achieve this:
- Define clear hiring objectives. Establish specific criteria for the skills, experience, and personality traits you seek in an agent. This ensures you attract and discover candidates who are a better fit for your call center’s culture and requirements from the get-go.
- Develop a comprehensive onboarding program. Equip and engage agents from day one. Go beyond basic training and include introductions to company culture and values, thorough technology and tools training, clear performance expectations and plans for growth and development, as well as mentorship or buddy programs.
- Provide early engagement and feedback. Regularly check in with new hires, offer support, and provide constructive feedback during the initial onboarding period. This demonstrates your investment in their success and helps identify any challenges early on, when attrition rates tend to be even higher.
2. Identify Key Sources of Agent Stress
A Salesforce survey found that 71% of service agents in contact centers had considered quitting in the past six months and 69% considered leaving customer service entirely. While agent stress levels have dipped from their peaks in the post-pandemic period, it remains vitally important to identify sources—and warning signs—of agent stress.
According to the survey, some of the biggest workplace stressors for agents include:
- Managing work-life balance (41%)
- Handling complex customer concerns (36%)
- Answering too many calls (34%)
3. Stay Connected and in Communication
If you’re unaware of which stressors are weighing down your team, it’s best to ask. Make time for team meetings, but give agents an overview of the agenda so you can have an open and productive discussion. Then add one-on-one meetings to the mix. Keep conversations regular – weekly rather than monthly – and keep them short. All you need is 15-20 minutes when your agents have a clear agenda upfront.
Another way to identify stressors and monitor agent well-being over time is to conduct quick online surveys every quarter or every six months. They have the added benefit of giving you evidence and opportunity to nip new stress factors in the bud.
4. Put Agent Engagement at the Core of Your Contact Center Management Strategy
Communication is central to a larger point that’s worth driving home: engaged agents are more likely to stay—and more likely to drive excellent customer experiences.
In fact, McKinsey research found that agents who were engaged and satisfied were:
- 5x more likely to stay than leave within a year
- 16x more likely to refer friends to their company
- 3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues
While, below, we’ll delve further into granular tactics that can help drive engagement and improve agent experiences in the contact center, it’s important to underline that engaging and retaining talent starts with a strategic commitment from the top.
This commitment should be reflected in your company culture, management practices, and investment in resources that support agent well-being and professional development. By prioritizing agent engagement, you not only reduce attrition but also create a more positive and productive work environment for everyone.
5. Reward and Recognize Performance
Want to keep your best agents? Show them you value their contributions! It’s not just about the paycheck (although that’s important too!). Here’s how to make recognition and reward a core part of your contact center culture:
- Keep compensation competitive: Stay ahead of the curve by regularly benchmarking your salaries and benefits against industry standards and local market rates.
- Reward results: Implement performance-based incentives that provide tangible rewards for achieving goals. This could include bonuses, gift cards, extra time off, or other perks.
- Celebrate success: Publicly acknowledge and celebrate agent achievements, both big and small. Create a “Wall of Fame” or use internal communication channels to highlight successes.
- Make it fun with gamification: Inject some excitement into the workday with call center gamification tools. Use points, badges, and leaderboards to track performance and encourage friendly competition.
6. Build Flexibility into Agent Schedules
After higher pay, what agents really want is increased flexibility at work (34%). One of the best ways to gauge how to boost morale is by asking your team what flexibility means to them. By making time to regularly reassess schedules, you can help provide a responsive workplace strategy that supports your agents while still aligning with ever-changing customer and business requirements.
Add Self-Scheduling Tools to Your Tech Stack
Leveraging agent self-scheduling tools can put better work-life balance and flexibility right in the hands of your agents. Leading software gives agents access to self-service features in the convenience of a mobile app or browser, including:
- Shift bidding
- Shift preference
- Shift trading
- Time-off requests
7. Streamline Evaluations and Feedback
Regular and constructive feedback is vital for agent growth and development. Implement a streamlined process that provides:
- Consistent evaluations: Use automated quality management software to evaluate 100% of interactions against consistent criteria and without bias.
- Targeted feedback: Your tools should also identify specific areas for improvement and provide personalized, actionable advice.
- Timely delivery: Deliver feedback promptly after the evaluated interaction, while it’s still fresh in the agent’s mind, with the help of QM tools. Then follow up on broader trends and ongoing issues with more in-depth coaching sessions.
8. Listen to and Learn from Your Customers
Want to know how to really improve your contact center? Listen to your customers! They hold the key to unlocking valuable voice of the customer insights that can transform your agent performance and customer experience. Here’s how to tap into their voice:
- Embrace conversation intelligence: Invest in tools that analyze the nuances of customer interactions and provide you with actionable data. Think sentiment analysis and voice analytics that help you identify markers and root causes of positive and negative customer experiences.
- Discover and Share Best Practices: Analyze successful interactions to uncover best practices. Share these with your team to raise the bar for everyone.
- Coach with Customer Insights: Use customer feedback to inform your coaching and training programs. This ensures your training is relevant and addresses real-world scenarios.
9. Invest in Technology and Tools
Though it might come further down the typical agent’s wish list than adequate compensation and work-life balance, there’s no way around technology’s crucial role in combatting contact center attrition.
For starters, without intuitive and reliable tools that eliminate cumbersome manual processes like after-call work or that provide easy access to important data, agents are bound to be frustrated. Why make their jobs harder than they need to be?
Of course, ease-of-use and automation are only the half of it. As we’ve explored throughout this guide, the right contact center workforce engagement management software can also support agents and managers alike with data-driven customer insights, personalized feedback, flexible scheduling, and much more.
A Contact Center Employee Retention Success Story
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 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%, and the cost of hiring went down when attrition shrank by 25%.
Want to learn more about the end-to-end WFO solutions Calabrio delivers to reduce attention, drive productivity, and provide better service and sales?
