What’s the lifeblood of your contact center? Hint: it’s not your latest tech. Or your impeccable processes. Or that beautifully organized KPI report you display each week. It’s your team — your contact center agents.
Your agents are your customer’s first point of contact. They hold the keys to your customer service success and, in turn, your bottom line.
- 86% of customers will quit doing business with a company because of a bad experience.
- If a company delivers excellent customer service, 78% of consumers will do business with them again — even if they make a mistake.
- Consumers who rate a company’s service as “good” are 38% more likely to recommend them to others.
So, you see, your agents have a lot of pull in determining whether your customers will churn or stay loyal. They influence whether your customers share positive stories about you or drag your brand through the mud. In other words, if your agents are happy and prepared to do their jobs well, your customers will thrive. But if your agents are disengaged or poorly trained, everyone suffers.
As a contact center manager, you shape your agent’s quality of work. Your ability to fight agent turnover and keep agents sharp, engaged, and happy can make or break a customer’s experience. And while it is a huge weight to carry, don’t worry, an AI contact center can help.
The Top 5 Reasons Your Agents Are Leaving You
Contact centers have a bad reputation. They lose employees a lot. In fact, attrition and turnover rates in contact centers have remained between 30% and 45% for decades. And some centers are now seeing annual turnover rates as high as 100%.
Ouch.
Why don’t agents want to stay on the job? Here are a few key reasons why call center agents peace out early.
1. Burnout
Burnout is ubiquitous in contact centers. Every day, agents go to work and spend hours interacting with angry people they’re supposed to make happy. They’re pressured to handle a long list of tedious tasks as fast as possible while having little time to breathe or socialize. And their teammates keep quitting. Of course, this leads to burnout!
2. Lack of Career Growth
As many as 63% of Americans told Pew Research they left their jobs because they lacked career advancement opportunities. Agents often see their roles as dead-end jobs. If a growth path forward isn’t clear or available, they quickly lose motivation and look for growth elsewhere.
3. Inadequate Training and Support
There’s nothing worse than walking into a fraught customer conversation without all the info you need to succeed. (Believe me, I’ve lived it!) Contact center agents usually get the short end of the stick with training and support. This leads to them being ill-equipped to handle customer issues. Over time, being set up to fail gets old, and they quit.
4. Poor Work-Life Balance
Irregular hours, mandatory overtime, and an inability to disconnect from work severely hurt agents’ work-life balance. When work starts encroaching on their personal lives and time, they’re more likely to resent the job and management. Before long, they’re looking elsewhere for work.
5. Low Pay and Benefits
Compensation plays a significant role in job satisfaction. When agents feel underpaid and undervalued on top of their already difficult jobs, employers practically show them the door.
The financial impact of this turnover is staggering.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for a contact center agent is $39,680. When an agent leaves, it’s estimated to cost nine months of their salary to replace them. That’s about $29,760 per agent.
That’s just one agent, though. Remember: the turnover rate is 30–45% annually. If we shoot for somewhere between that rate, a contact center with 100 agents losing 35 agents in a year could cost a company over $1 million!
What could you do with an extra million dollars every year?
I haven’t even gotten to the other effects of turnover. For one, it’s a major bummer, so morale takes a hit. And with agents leaving left and right, you spend most of your time training new hires instead of improving operations and performance. Productivity slows. Service quality gets super inconsistent. Wait times lengthen, and your CSAT scores plummet.
See that domino effect? It ain’t pretty.
But there’s a solution on the horizon (and it may surprise you). Enter the AI contact center.
What is an AI Contact Center?
An AI contact center is just as it sounds, a contact center that operates with any amount of artificial intelligence. Often, it adds AI to enhance and supplement various aspects of your customer operations. AI-powered tools, like intelligent call routing, automation, chatbots, IVAs, and real-time analytics, simplify contact center operations, giving agents the freedom to focus on complex, skills-based interactions while promoting better customer and agent experiences.
Learn more about our AI solution, Go.AI.
What are the Benefits of an AI Contact Center?
An AI contact center has a ton of benefits. Here are a few.
- Improved efficiency. AI and automation remove the burden of those tedious, repetitive tasks your agents handle every day. With those tasks out of the way, agents can finally take a moment to breathe. What’s more, they can use their new-found freedom from repetition to answer more complex issues that require a human touch.
- Enhanced customer experiences. AI contact center tools can compile customer insights using customer experience analytics. This extra info about the customer lets agents tailor interactions and provide a more personalized customer experience. Plus, with improved efficiency, more customers get the help they need, which improves satisfaction.
- Better decision-making. Real-time analytics and predictive insights help you make data-informed decisions about workforce management, performance, training, and strategy.
Learn more about how your contact center can benefit from AI in our ebook.
7 Ways AI Reduces Turnover in Your Contact Center
I promise, there’s a connection between an AI contact center and your headache-worthy turnover. Here are seven ways adding AI can help reduce turnover and keep agents on board.
1. Use Customer Sentiment Analysis
AI can analyze customer interactions to gauge sentiment and provide much-needed context. This info gives agents insights to help them handle calls more effectively and reduce stress.
2. Reduce Wait Times and Call Times
Intelligent call routing ensures calls are directed to agents with the best skills to help each customer. Wait times drop, so customers are happier when they reach your agents. This reduces stress during interactions. And by connecting customers to the right agent, resolution rates improve, and agents handle issues using their personal strengths.
3. Enhance Customer Self-Service
AI-powered self-service options, like chatbots and IVAs, let customers resolve simple issues on their own. Fewer calls mean lower agent workloads, opening up space in the day for breaks, training, and team building.
4. Improve Real-Time Coaching with Agent Assist
Use AI to offer agents real-time suggestions and guidance during calls. From your desk, you can provide coaching tips or guide AI bots to give words of wisdom to enhance agent performance and confidence. This boosts morale and gives agents the skills that make them more effective in their roles. And that keeps agents loyal to your company.
5. Automate Repetitive Tasks
Cut back on agent’s repetitive tasks, like data entry and follow-up emails. With the boring work out of the way, agents can actually use their brains and skills to take on engaging work and focus on their professional growth.
6. Get Proactive with Predictive Analytics
AI can predict potential issues and customer needs so you can get ahead of stressful situations and proactively address issues. This boosts CSAT. But more importantly, by reducing the number of frustrated customers, you also alleviate agent frustration and burnout.
7. Personalize Your Training Programs
Personalize your training to help agents hone their skills to fit their career goals. With AI, you can identify skill gaps. Then, AI tools can recommend personalized training programs, ensuring agents have the tools and knowledge they need to succeed.
