11 September 2007

Staff turnover and training costs the industry £2.53 billion

A growing training and support gap in the UK's nearly 6,000 contact centres is impacting customer service for the worse.

According to figures from knowledge transfer provider Knowledge Solutions, the high rate of staff turnover of nearly 25 percent and the need to train new starters is costing the industry £2.53 billion in unnecessary time and resources.

While training staff is a recognised need in all sectors, the contact centre industry is particularly pressured due to:

• staff attrition - high rates of agent churn mean that recruiting and training new staff takes a disproportionate amount of resource

• the technology-intensive nature of contact centres means that strong support systems are necessary to avoid operational errors. This technology is evolving rapidly and every new system that goes live adds to the need for training and support

• shift working - changing shift patterns mean that it is difficult, if not impossible to train all staff through traditional classroom based courses

• real-time operations - customers want answers and information in real-time, meaning that agents need sufficient training and support to provide fast, accurate responses

• capacity issues - fitting in large scale training courses dramatically reduces available agents, causing capacity issues for contact centres

The billions wasted comes from three sources - standard agent training, training new joiners and ongoing support queries. Each of the UK's 960,000 agents spends 24 hours on training per year, according to statistics from Blue Sky Performance Improvement. Given the high rates of agent churn, most contact centres are continually training new joiners, with an average induction period of nine days. In both of these cases, Knowledge Solutions believe that at least 50 percent of this could be cut by better use of online learning and support materials that enable agents to train at their own pace.

"The contact centre is at the front line of delivering customer service for the majority of organisations, meaning that agents must be equipped with the knowledge and support to meet customer needs," commented Adrian Palmer-Geaves, CEO of Knowledge Solutions. "However, simply running overlong training sessions that aren't tailored to agent roles leads to a colossal waste of resources - and often doesn't improve customer service levels. Contact centre managers need to think differently when it comes to training and support and look at how they can reduce this overhead - given the rising levels of agent churn in the industry this problem is only going to increase."

Related link:http://www.callcentre.co.uk/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=259723&CMPI_SHARED_articleId=68658&CMPI_SHARED_ImageArticleId=68658&CMPI_SHARED_articleIdRelated=68658&CMPI_SHARED_ToolsArticleId=68658&CMPI_SHARED_C