The “Great Resignation”
Approaching 2022, organizations face a new human behaviour related challenge, the “Great Resignation”.
Kate Morgan reported this for the BBC in July 2021:
“A Microsoft survey of more than 30,000 global workers showed that 41% of workers were considering quitting or changing professions this year, and a study from HR software company Personio of workers in the UK and Ireland showed 38% of those surveyed planned to quit in the next six months to a year. In the US alone, April saw more than four million people quit their jobs, according to a summary from the Department of Labor – the biggest spike on record.”
What’s the damage?
This will have a massive impact on contact centres.
Televerde and SharpenCX both note in their blog posts that in pre-Covid times, contact centres had an average attrition rate of 45%. For a 100-seat contact centre, 45 agents needed replacing each year.
The “Great Resignation” will push that figure far higher, especially in the medical and technology sectors. Wages are increasing dramatically and businesses are struggling to recruit and retain talent.
The cost of replacing these agents is not just about recruiting, selecting and training successful candidates. It also includes the new hire’s reduced productivity. Televerde estimates a new contact centre agent takes 5 months to become fully productive. This means 5 months of higher Average Handling Time (AHT), lower First Contact Resolution (FCR) and lower Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores for each new agent.
How can we plug the leak?
CallCentreHelper came to the rescue with a number of ideas in their article on improving employee experience on the 14th June.
Here, we will concentrate on those recommendations related to the Agent Desktop, where we at Omningage can help you. We provide a cloud-based desktop application for Agents and Supervisors. It sits on top of Amazon Connect augmenting its call, chat and task routing functionality with a user-friendly UI and a wide range of integrations and additional features.
One contributor – Ed Creasy of Calabrio – recommends decluttering the agent desktop by integrating it with other applications.
Omningage Connect users can switch from accessing customer data to the CRM system at the click of a tab without having to log into multiple applications.
Nikhil Shoorij of Infobip recommends keeping a close eye on agent workload to prevent agent burnout.
The Omningage Supervisor desktop provides a wide range of reports and monitoring tools to give supervisors the situational awareness they need. Our integrations also reduce the stress involved in having to handle multiple applications and interfaces.
Annette Miesbach of NICE recommends “allowing agents to grow up” by allowing them to see their own metrics to understand their impact on contact centre operations.
At Omningage, we provide agents with a dashboard containing a wide range of KPI reports so that they can see how they perform against target.
Aviad Abiri of NICE and Alex Stenton-Hibbert of Business Systems both recommend gamification based on KPIs.
Not only can Omningage gamify many standard KPI reports, such as AHT or CSAT, but we can also create bespoke gamification reports on request.
The desktop’s impact on staff retention
Among the main drivers of the “Great Resignation” have been companies telling staff to come back to the office. Many organizations are now looking at ways to build working from home into the employee experience.
When contact centre staff work from home, they use the desktop every second of every day that they work.
It is their employee experience. A well-designed desktop with an uncluttered and user-friendly interface, seamless integrations to other applications and easy to read reports giving users near real-time information makes working a more pleasant experience, reduces staff attrition and staff replacement costs.
To discuss your requirements, arrange a demonstration or ask for a proof of concept, please use the below details.
