Operations vice president Michael Moody says his company has reduced attrition levels and improved punctuality since introducing a new initiative 18 months ago.
OnBrand24 employs 350 to 400 agents with clients in retail, computer software and hospital care. “We give constant feedback when something is positive or negative we offer feedback immediately.” Xact Telesolutions also uses its weekly company newsletter to publicly congratulate an agent who’s received positive acknowledgement from a customer. “We review all their phone calls, monitoring and encouraging them and giving them feedback.” She says the company uses instant messaging posting a positive message in real time on the community bulletin board as well as feedback through weekly scorecards. Gray says the company offers shadow training where the agent will be coached on a call with suggestions whispered in their ears and more formal classroom training. Real time monitoring and post call monitoring and we score agents on the call transaction and there are metrics which are specific to the account.” An agent is assigned five to six accounts and this is why there is an incentive to have mastery in these lines. “They can increase their pay by mastering accounts. She says the company incentivises by skill-sets with bonus awarded for the extra skills staff acquire. The company offers sales and help-desk support for a range of clients including those in the hospitality sector, higher education, manufacturing and subscription-based services.
Business development director Kathy Gray says: “We’re very much into empowering agents with information and training, when you do this and give a quality experience you have long standing customers.” The company conducts quarterly employee surveys to keep its finger on the pulse about what the workforce think. It’s another operator which sets great store by rewarding staff for good performance on an ongoing basis. and says its attrition rates are well below the industry average. Xact Telesolutions employs 350 agents across 20 states in the U.S. “Our care has improved, handle times have reduced for call resolution, quality scores are increasing and errors are decreasing.” Lawson says the initiative also reaped return on investment with extra client bonuses for excelling benchmarking standards. The company also found it was coming top for customer care in the benchmarking surveys of its key clients. We will be implementing this concept of an entry level, expert and master level to our supervisors.” “This has been tremendously successful for us. Attrition levels also plummeted with Telvista now only losing 6% of staff on an annual basis. Absenteeism also significantly reduced to just 2.6% for masters compared with 4.4% for those at associate level.
Masters were also gaining top marks of more than 100% on their quality scorecards. The company saw error levels per agent reduce to just 1.1% at the master level from a typical 2% average for agents at the basic associate level. Agents with nine months of high performance can achieve an expert level and with a further nine months of hitting key metrics they can become masters with a dedicated work space, higher salary and shift benefits.”
“Out of this came a strategy called Telvista Edge which created an employment development career path.
Telvista’s senior sales vice president Rick Lawson says an employee survey revealed they needed to rethink how to reward staff. Contact center operators require highly skilled staff to hit their client benchmark standards which means engaged employees keen to make the customer feel good.Ĭontact center giant, Telvista which employs 7,000 agents worldwide implemented a staff incentive scheme three years ago after noticing their attrition rates were creeping up. It’s widely acknowledged that with technological advances and better informed customers that the job has become more challenging. It seems we are more inspired to try hard and do well if good work is recognized and contact center staff are no exception. Money may make the world go round but when it comes to feeling motivated at work it’s not the only factor.