Most business leaders understand how important employee engagement is for long-term success. Engaged employees tend to be motivated, dedicated to their job, and willing to go the extra mile to deliver better productivity. Employee engagement can be a critical driver for success in any industry. Conversely, poor employee engagement is likely to result in lowered productivity and increased employee turnover, which will subsequently require you to replace them using a staffing agency and your own recruiters. With poor engagement, this can quickly become a vicious and expensive cycle in terms of contact center employee retention. However, there are ways to prevent that from happening to your business.
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Reducing Churn in Contact Center Employees Using Speech Analytics
In certain business functions, such as a customer service or support contact center, this lack of engagement can spill over into reduced sales, dissatisfied customers, and poor customer service ratings. Business executives have to direct their focus on maximizing engagement levels and minimizing turnover among this segment of the workforce. Speech analytics offers several ways to accomplish these two goals.
Speech analytics is a radically different form of contact center management compared to conventional performance measurement. All it involves, on many levels, is listening to calls made or fielded by your contact center agents. In return, there are numerous benefits to a contact center function, particularly regarding agent churn and turnover. Read on to find out more.
Strengthen Employee Acquisition
Not all people are equally good in every role. You will have good contact center agents, and you will likely hire some that may not be suited to the role. Contact centers these days are about much more than just manning the phone. They increasingly follow trends appearing in customer experience and behavior. With hiring and onboarding costs being what they are, it can be increasingly expensive to make a bad hire.
A bad hire in a contact center function could cause even more damage in terms of customer relationships and business credibility. Speech analytics can speed up the hiring process by determining whether a potential candidate has the necessary raw materials for the role. It can pick up things like communication ability, listening power, and even empathy, which is far more important than company or product knowledge. This can be a useful tool in terms of your talent acquisition strategies.
Make Onboarding and Training More Efficient
Speech analytics doesn’t just make the hiring process faster. They also make onboarding and training new contact center hires more efficient. Most contact center managers will be looking to deploy new recruits as soon as possible. While a basic uniform training process may bring everyone up to speed, there is still the question of individual limitations and weaknesses. Using the speech analytics data from hiring along with the historical speech analytics from everyday operations, you should be able to create a stronger and far more efficient onboarding and training process. With key areas of interest already known to you, you can focus on helping new recruits transition faster and start delivering high-quality performance almost from day one.
Boost and Sustainably Maintain Performance
Speech analytics used in contact center operations can offer valuable insights regarding obstructions or bottlenecks that reduce efficiency. As far as a contact center manager is concerned, any wasted time is equivalent to lost productivity. Speech analytics can help managers pinpoint exactly where the problems lie and remove them to boost contact center performance. For example, if you identify problems with the hardware or software you use, you can reach out to your IT staffing partner and source IT support personnel quickly. At the same time, speech analytics can offer insights into what customers now expect from brands. This can help you come up with policies to maintain or even improve performance, offering the customer experience your audience desires.
Identify Areas for Professional Development
Of course, not all problems lie within the contact center process. They can sometimes exist in the employees themselves, limiting their ability to deliver results. However, this may not necessarily mean you have to replace them. Remember, hiring new talent is far more expensive than retaining and building the capacity of your existing workers. With that in mind, speech analytics can help managers identify precise agents and the skill gaps they have that prevent them from excelling at work. In many cases, a few professional development courses targeted at these specific skill gaps can yield results many times over.
You may even be able to identify employees with potential that can be employed more gainfully. For example, an agent with a background in technology and project management could be groomed for technical leadership roles such as a consultant offering vCISO services. It all depends on how much weight you assign to the use of speech analytics in your contact center operations. But in most cases, the use of this tool can greatly increase your ability to retain, manage, and boost your contact center workforce.
