The True (And Scary) Cost of Contact Centre Agent Disengagement in the UK – Stphen Pce CEO of SJS Solutions reveals the cost of Agent Disengagement in the UK Contact Centre
How do you measure the performance of a company? Is it the sales revenue or the market share? Is it the profit, the ROI or shareholders value? Sure, they are adequate indicators of a company’s success, but there’s a major driver for performance that often remains overlooked – the happiness of its employees. And while it may not be a top priority for a number of businesses, it is the backbone of companies focusing on customer experience.
According to Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends survey, Employee engagement and culture issues have risen to become the no. 1 challenge companies face around the world.
A further industry study showed that UK call centres face a staff turnover rate of 26% as opposed to an average UK turnover rate of 15%. To you that means; Every Year a Quarter of Your Front-Line Agents Head for the Door. Meaning a complete staff turnover every 4 years.
In a recent article, the Dale Carnegie Institute cited the main reasons for agent disengagement – lack of confidence in the abilities of senior management; lack of open communication and ability to influence the company’s vision and the pride employees take in working for that company. The same study showed that 80% of the sampled employees who were dissatisfied with their direct manager felt disengaged. At the opposite end, 54% of employees who were proud of their company’s contribution to society felt engaged.
Specific to our industry, figures show that failure to keep employees happy and engaged is costing the UK call centre industry as much as £2.3 billion every year. And that doesn’t take into account the damage done to customer experience. it’s not only the cost of staff turnover but also the associated cost of staff absenteeism, poor productivity, and reduced efficiency that affects business results.
So How Can We Improve Agent Engagement?
Stephen Pace, CEO of SJS Solutions, The renowned Contact Centre Software developers, notes that agent disengagement is an evolving challenge for call centres globally and as such has been the focus of the work he and his team have been doing with with Contact Centers around the world, across all industry sectors.
Optymyse Advanced Wallboard Technology is a completely new way to empower, engage and motivate your agents. To have the biggest impact we strongly encourage our customers to replace negative call handling metrics with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promotor Scores (NPS), and to move as far away from traditional wallboard or dashboards layouts as possible.
