How Internal Metrics can Help You Decrease Turnover Rates

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Big Data for Decreasing TurnoverIn the world of call cen­ters, met­rics are king. Res­o­lu­tion time, first call res­o­lu­tion, CSAT scores, and aver­age call dura­tion, to name a few, are metic­u­lously tracked, recorded, ana­lyzed, and then acted upon. The goal, typ­i­cally, is to use these met­rics to increase cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, yet it’s often at the expense of call cen­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion – which in the call cen­ter indus­try, is quite a prob­lem; in an indus­try where a 60% turnover rate is con­sid­ered good, one must ask – how use­ful is cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing if you can’t retain employ­ees? Are we an indus­try too obsessed with metrics?

The good news for those in the call cen­ter world who enjoy the feed­back of met­rics, is that more met­rics, albeit inter­nal met­rics, just might be the solu­tion to help decrease turnover rates and raise cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion through improved employee sat­is­fac­tion. Accord­ing to the emerg­ing field known as “work-force sci­ence,” pre­vi­ously held assump­tions that have gov­erned hir­ing prac­tices in call cen­ters and tech are being turned on their head. By using “big data,” a.k.a, hun­dreds of thou­sands of aggre­gated met­rics and reports, researchers are unearthing new cor­re­la­tions in data to guide HR depart­ments in their hir­ing practices.

A recent New York Times arti­cle enti­tled “Big Data, Try­ing to Build Bet­ter Work­ers,” pro­files the bur­geon­ing indus­try of work-force sci­ence and high­lights some of the find­ings that have been found to decrease turnover rates and improve man­age­ment styles, specif­i­cally in call cen­ters. One of the work-force sci­ence star­tups, Evolv, found that cer­tain traits in man­age­ment and in employ­ees resulted in less turnover churn and helped lead to improved call cen­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion rates.

Many HR depart­ments at call cen­ters put a great deal of focus on their hir­ing assess­ments of the employ­ees them­selves. It’s true that employee tem­pera­ment and work styles will cer­tainly have an impact on the worker’s job suc­cess, but in ana­lyz­ing “big data,” Evolv researchers found that super­vi­sors and man­age­ment are one of the keys to decrease turnover rates and improve job per­for­mance. Specif­i­cally, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles and warmth of a man­ager or super­vi­sor were strongly cor­re­lated with higher call cen­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion and lower turnover.

Addi­tion­ally, through analy­sis of per­son­al­ity assess­ments with suc­cess­ful man­agers, researchers found that some of the most impor­tant fac­tors pre­dict­ing inno­v­a­tive and happy lead­ers come from those indi­vid­u­als who have a strong sense of mis­sion and who have per­sonal auton­omy in their jobs.

So if call cen­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion begins with the attrib­utes of the man­age­ment team, what should call cen­ter HR depart­ments look for when it comes to find­ing employ­ees who will work pro­duc­tively and remain sat­is­fied in their job? Surely some aspects of an employee’s work his­tory still mat­ter, right? Well, accord­ing to the new research from work-force sci­ence, look­ing merely at the tra­di­tional guide­lines of pre­vi­ous job length or unem­ploy­ment gaps is actu­ally not a great indi­ca­tor of future results or success.

Evolv applied work-force sci­ence and big data to a large call cen­ter, Transcom. Using per­son­al­ity char­ac­ter­is­tic tests, and cor­re­lat­ing the results with job per­for­mance and turnover, the researchers found that traits such as hon­esty could result in a worker stay­ing in the posi­tion 20 – 30% longer than those employ­ees who scored lower on the hon­esty trait. Addi­tion­ally, researchers in the work-force sci­ence field found that those who are most suc­cess­ful at sales have an attribute of “emo­tional courage” – the abil­ity to be per­sis­tent after first being told no.

In light of the most recent stud­ies using big data and work-force sci­ence, the find­ings show that to decrease turnover rates and improve call cen­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion, the effort begins at the top, by look­ing care­fully at man­age­ment tem­pera­ment and with cus­tomer ser­vice man­age­ment train­ing. When it comes to call cen­ter employee recruit­ment and screen­ing prac­tices, instead of sim­ply look­ing at work his­tory, for exam­ple, a more thor­ough inter­view process, ref­er­ence checks, and team inter­views can help the HR staff iden­tify tem­pera­ment char­ac­ter­is­tics such as hon­esty and how peo­ple han­dle stress.

Hope­fully, by focus­ing more on hir­ing prac­tices, man­age­ment train­ing, and cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing, com­pa­nies can start eval­u­at­ing inter­nal met­rics to find their own cor­re­la­tions with call cen­ter employee sat­is­fac­tion, which should lead to decreased turnover rates.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jodi Beuder
We help organizations create a positive connection between customers and brands. We promote synergy through integration as it builds on the decades of collective history of renowned expertise. MHI Global is your comprehensive source for customer-management excellence solutions to compete in today's ever-changing, customer-centric environment.

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