Agent Turnover – How Knowledge Management Solves One Of The Biggest Call-Center Challenge
Posted On: December 20, 2021
The call center employee is the first to speak to the customer and has the unique opportunity to make an emotional connection with them. Agents who are trained to contact customers and ask what they are doing and what they have done to share with themselves are empowered to be empathetic, natural, and positive in their tone of voice.
As a call center, providing your customers a place to search for answers can help empower them, and it can help reduce the number of calls you have to handle as a new agent. People who work in the same role as their recruits can help them understand what their most frequent calls look like and what their customers need to hear about their interactions. For example, if you ask callers or job applicants to describe specific situations they have had to deal with, such as a demanding customer or colleague, and how they have dealt with it and how it has turned out, you can gain valuable insights into how they respond to stress and conflict.
However, knowledge management software can eliminate the tricky process of asking other employees during the training period of the agent.
The Effectiveness of Knowledge Management
Whether it is a fast, multi-channel, self-service, or live agent-supported real-time solution, Knowledge management for customer service is a valuable tool. Powerful solutions through knowledge management help call center agents to answer questions on time and from any device empower organizations in different industries to capture, develop and share knowledge, reducing call center operating costs and agent training time.
Knowledge management effectively manages one of the biggest challenges for call centers in the form of agent turnover. Knowledge management can easily manage the company’s existing knowledge and streamline the training and upskilling of agents, find out more on this in the following section. Knowledge management systems‘ most significant advantage is promoting self-service among employees and consumers, effectively reducing manual work hours.
Agent Turnover & Knowledge Management
A few critical factors influence agent turnover, and controlling them may help in reducing the turnover. If adopted, Knowledge Management could play a significant role in affecting these factors
1. Knowledge Management Improves the Call-center Experience
There are several reasons why proper training can help reduce call center turnover. The first reason is that a well-trained agent feels more competent and less likely to quit. For example, a call center agent needs more time processing customer calls than coordinating with their colleagues. So a real-time analytics engine on knowledge management software can propose practical training materials to improve agents knowledge of specific areas and general guidelines for managing calls.
Knowledge Management proves to be an excellent tool for training and the onboarding process. Knowledge management systems capture, distribute and preserve information, prioritizing ease of access and collaboration.
2. Knowledge Management backs a sturdy Training Program
Modern knowledge management systems can create personalized learning modules according to the existing skill set of agents and employees.
A solid training plan will help you retain your employees and allow them to provide the best service to your customers. Without an investment in quality education and development, your employees will offer no value, and employees will be kept on the same page. To retain employees for the long term, you must begin to measure the success of your recruitment process and evaluate the performance of new employees. All of these can be easily managed with knowledge management tools.
3. Effective Hiring and Knowledge Management
The process of hiring call center representatives – be they customer service representatives, telemarketers, or technical support agents – can seem like an endless task. Recruiters need to fill these roles and make intelligent new hires to reduce turnover and increase success. Hiring call center agents can be complex, and it can be even more complicated if you feel you have to hire a large number of people with high turnover.
This means that if one of your primary objectives in the call center is to reduce agent turnover rates in the call center to a low level, focus on employee retention. Employees leave call centers because they feel they do not have the right job, so it’s easy to see how hiring suitable candidates can help decrease turnover rates. The vast majority of call center experience urgently needs to reduce turnover rates by switching through a broad mix of channels that facilitate customer interaction through self-service tools.
4. Knowledge Management Helps Manage Turnover Rates
With a 25-35% turnover rate in call centers, it isn’t easy to maintain high-quality customer service. From simple engagements to transaction discussions of all kinds, high turnover burdens operating budgets. Based on customers’ “contract rates, sellers can only afford to pay their agents $10-12 an hour, and customers expect high sales in a competitive labor market.
Companies spend a lot of capital on employee training purposes. However, In line with the onboarding process, many call centers do not provide enough time and budget to train new employees. With the conception of the Knowledge base for support agents, the training time for the information agents is halved. Sometimes, the learning modules do not sync with the employees’ existing skillset, leading to time and resource wastage.
The goal is to increase sales volume, improve lead generation, shorten the time for nested call centers, define goals and train their employees according to these goals. Letting the new agents go through a comprehensive onboarding and training process should be necessary for call centers. Creating personalized learning modules that are in-tune with the existing skillset is also mandatory to save time and resources. Implementing more self-service platforms to ease manual labor from human agents could also go a long way in managing a high turnover rate with this software.
Conclusion
Today’s tech-savvy customers indeed ask agents tricky questions that cannot be solved in one fell swoop. Call-center agents need to know where to find the information to answer customer questions and solve their problems. Agents also need to have the latest technology at their disposal to help them answer customer queries effectively and focus on important aspects like customer interaction and customer experience. Knowledge Management is one of the most effective ways to quench high turnover rates and upskilling agents to handle complex situations.
