How Stress Contributes to High Staff Attrition

Call center agents have a stressful job; there's no questioning that.There are many things that cause agent stress. In this post we list a few and how it can be relieved using Cxceed, helping lower your staff attrition rate.

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Appraisals

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Bad Clients

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Call Center Metrics

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Information Overload

Appraisals

Agents usually start with a strong will to prove themselves and want to improve their performance. When they have to wait for several months for an appraisal, their performance (good or bad) has already become a habit and is hard to change. When appraisal time rolls around, they receive a mountain of issues needed to be fixed all at once. Instead of the will to fix them, they can feel overwhelmed and less motivated to do the job, often leaving.

A rectangle split in two, first part containing ‘Appraisals give agents a mountain of mistakes to fix all at once’ preceded by pieces of paper, and the second part containing‘We offer daily evaluations to make feedback on-going’ followed by the Bebexs logo.

How We Help

Cxceed is a system that utilizes daily evaluations to make feedback on-going and calibration reports to provide consistency across the organisation. On-going feedback not only helps employees perfect their job but also helps management get more out of their employees compared to using the traditional appraisal method.

When given constructive feedback shortly after committing an error, agents can use this to avoid repeating it in the future. Using Cxceed to provide frequent feedback takes the stress away from agents, knowing they are going in the right direction.

Bad Clients

There are thousands of call center workers who put up with customers who cause a headache. While most call because they genuinely need help, there will always be others who are a challenge – whether it’s down to ignorance, a lack of empathy or just plain rudeness.

For any agent working at an inbound call center, the unknown caller is always a stressful experience. If a rude client makes a complaint against an agent, it can cause a lot of stress as they fear they could lose their job.

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How We Help

While we can't stop rude customers from calling (we wish we could), Cxceed can put your agents at ease.

Our indexing system makes it easy to find a specific call, so if a complaint is made, it is easy to go straight to the call to hear what actually happened with the client. 

Call Center Metrics

Metrics can cause agents a lot of stress. Take Average Handle Time (AHT) which measures the time an agent is on a call when they are trying to solve the client's query. If agents use a lot of time on just one call they can find themselves in trouble, forcing them to rush calls. Rushing can only lead to one thing and thats mistakes, making the number of dissatisfied customers rise, and the call center's CSAT score go down.

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How We Help

Cxceed helps agents focus on their call handling skills through ongoing coaching and training, which will help decrease the average call handling time. Management can help the employees be better problem solvers through this training which will lead to them solving queries faster and more accurately. Less rushing, less blushing - just higher quality interactions with customers.

Information Overload

Agents need to have a firm knowledge of the area they work in and to deliver the best possible service. The beginning months are usually the toughest for agents, given the short amount of time available for them to learn new information. It's the same in all line of work. Managers tend to punish agents for providing wrong information to customer queries and if that wasn't stressful enough, metrics such as AHT force agents to give the correct answer in the shortest time possible! A horrible start to a new job and one which will cause a lot of stress.

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How We Help

Cxceed helps management target training appropriately, with each evaluation being an opportunity to indicate areas for improvement. Making learning an ongoing process and part of their daily routine, leaves agents feeling less stressed as the workload is spread out. They don't have to cram and can relax a little more when working, creating a nicer enviroment.

The Wrap-Up

Management can lower employee stress levels by implementing Cxceed. Ongoing evaluations identify issues that can be rectified quickly and can also highlight areas where further training is needed.

This feedback helps agents do their job better, leading to greater job satisfaction and lower employee turnover rates - a win-win.

Feel free to leave a comment down below if you have any tips you wish to share.

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