Becoming an Employer of Choice: Delivering Flexibility to the contact centre industry through AI
AI technology is transforming the lives of contact centre employees
A recent report from Stanford University highlighted that Gen Z are entering the workforce in numbers and are challenging existing employment paradigms including ditching employer loyalty. Along with COVID-19 having reshaped work dynamics, and attrition rates in the contact centre industry remaining stubbornly high, businesses will need to transform if they want to keep their employees and control their costs.
The forces driving contact centre change
New generations
As Gen Z rise through the workforce replacing the aging Boomer generation, they bring a different set of values and behaviours than other generations before them. Gen Z have a strong focus on mental health and wellbeing, they care about the ethics and morality of their employers and are open to challenging the status quo. As children during the global financial crisis of 2008, Gen Z witnessed how companies often failed to support their employees as they saw their parents and older family members being laid off, they understandably have a different attitude to loyalty to their employer. They don’t see a “job for life” as previous generations have.
Whilst Gen Z see work-life balance as non-negotiable, there’s a growing trend across the whole workforce as a YouGov poll reported almost half of employees wanted more flexibility in their jobs, with understandably, work-life balance the most popular reason.
Remote and hybrid working
The contact centre industry went through a seismic change during the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2020 we were talking with a company who was going to pilot 25 remote workers that year. By March they had moved 2,000 workers to remote working. Social distancing requirements accelerated the technology solutions to provide secure, connected, and managed remote teams.
Many employees still work at remotely, or on a hybrid basis, in the UK more than a quarter of adults were working on a hybrid basis in October 2024. Whilst the availability of remote workers gives employers a wider recruitment pool, it also allows employees to seek opportunities beyond their commutable locality.
Employee retention
Alongside the shift in workforce demographics and working style, contact centres continue to struggle with the expensive challenge of attrition. Exacerbated by the willingness of Gen Z employees to move, the turnover rate of the contact centre industry has been quoted at between 30-45% by analysts, although we know of companies in the UK with attrition over 60% and companies in the US experiencing well over 100% attrition. The financial cost alone of this is huge, not to mention the loss of knowledge as trained employees leave.
How to fix this
With recruitment and training costing millions, the question that contact centre operations and HR teams are asking is, “how can we stop this?” The question they should be asking is “how can we become an employer where our staff want to stay with us?” How do companies become an Employer of Choice?
There are many articles and studies showing the top reasons why people leave their jobs and recommendations on what to do to keep employees. The UK identifies the first strategy to retain staff and create a thriving environment is to “promote shifts that support work/life balance”. In Australia their Contact Centre Magazine are right up front with “embrace flexible work arrangements”.
In our experience, we have found employees who refuse to move from a department where they have ultimate flexibility in their working schedules to a department who is yet to roll out the technology that will give them the flexibility. Flexibility is truly a major driver for retaining staff.
The tools unlocking schedule flexibility
There are WFM solutions that struggle to provide the level of flexibility employees are now demanding. Some flexibility is being offered albeit with manual steps and a time lag between requesting an out-of-schedule change and resolving it, either with approval or refusal. And there are some solutions which do approve automatically, but with limited guard-rails around service performance, which potentially risks CX.
In 2016 the introduction of intraday automation provided actionable real-time information and algorithms to automate manual tasks, freeing up staff and achieving up until then unrealised levels of flexibility within their daily schedule. This solution offered a proactive approach to real-time management. The key to the solution was to ensure that schedule flexibility was achieved without impacting the customer service performance; no matter what was being asked for, it is automatically assessed within seconds and only requests are offered which either improve or at the least do not impact the customer service.
Schedule optimisation gives flexibility AND improves customer experience
These algorithms have always spotted unproductive idle time in schedules and recommend redeployment to other more productive activities, such as training or 1-2-1’s. Equally this technology can also identify in advance any potential service level threats. The algorithms identify automatically and recommend which employees with the right skills will be idle or on a non-urgent task who can then be moved to deal with a service level threat.
Even in these situations where there is a coverage issue identified (there are not enough people to ensure the service levels will be met), employees can still request time off or a change to their schedules, because the advanced algorithms identify if the request to move to another time may in fact improve the coverage in the new time. If they have selected a “red-to-red” coverage move where the move improves the customer experience, the move will be automatically approved.
Radical autonomy for employees
This AI powered schedule optimisation means that employees can swap, move, and change their working times but it’s always done in ways that enhance the schedule fit. As schedule fit and employee experience go up, CX goes up. Another important by-product of the employees’ flexing and moving their shifts is the improvement in their performance as they can chose the hours the work, and their tenure at the company increases which in turn helps to reduce attrition.
By giving agents true flexibility in their working life, or as some companies term it ‘radical autonomy’ using such solutions and finding idle time and offering agents more productive activities like training which improve their skills, it becomes a real “no-brainer” – companies are becoming employers of choice – it is revolutionizing their businesses.
A modularised resource management platform is the complete solution to being an Employer of Choice
The key technological magic for a company to become an Employer of Choice is that they can offer “radical autonomy” to their staff, be they in the front office, back office, or at the branch or a field service role. They can do it without ever compromising the schedule fit (which means your customer service) and in many instances it is enhanced.
The arrival of Gen Z in the workplace and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have fundamentally reshaped the contact centre industry. In order to compete, businesses must adapt and invest in the employee experience if they are to retain their top talent. Companies need to become an Employer of Choice.
Fiona Coleman is Co-Founder and Marketing Director at QStory
