Agent Attrition or turnover ratio represents the number of people leaving your company. Agent attribution is not always a necessarily bad thing, as your support agents will leave eventually and this is a factual reality. However, in general, a high turnover ratio signifies many critical issues inside a company, such as poor workplace policies, low salary, or simply a bad hiring process (among other things).

A high attrition ratio can affect a company extensively, for instance, training a support agent means spending a lot of time and resources on them. Therefore, an increased attrition ratio would suggest increased cost and low-quality customer support due to constantly varying agents and the lack of proper support staff’s training.

A support agent can leave the organization because of several reasons, i.e. they can leave due to personal reasons or they can be fired by the management in response to poor performance as well. Likewise, before calculating your turnover ratio, it is essential that you follow a proper procedure to ensure best results. By following these steps, you can calculate your company’s turnover ratio with ease.

Initially, identify your criteria of Agent Attrition. By doing so, you would be in a better position to collect, segment, and subsequently analyze data from your Contact Centre to better recognize your turnover ratio. The usual approach companies use to set their attrition criteria are:

• The turnover ratio of agents only inside the Contact Centre
• The turnover ratio of agents belonging to only a particular channel, telephone, email, live
• Chat, or technical support
• The turnover ratio of all employees in your company

Depending on your business strategy, what is considered as a turnover and how to calculate it may be slightly different. Therefore, in order to effectively distinguish such aspects your need to answers questions like,

• Did the agent leave voluntarily?
• What department did the agent belong to?
• Was the agent fired?
• Total time-period of the agent with the company
• Did the reason for an agent’s leaving the company is because they are moving somewhere else?

By answering these or similar questions, you can carefully set a criterion to what is included, in order to calculate your turnover.

Turnover Ratio is always calculated for a particular time-period, thus, depending on your strategy, you can calculate it for each month, every 3-months, 6-months, or even yearly. Similarly, after you have successfully selected a specific time period, you need to monitor agents that leave your organization during this period by keeping in view previously set-criteria of what is considered as a turnover.

After you have clearly stated your definition & criteria for Agent attrition, you can calculate it by using following formula:

Most prominently, increased agent attrition ratio can be a productivity killer for your support agents, resulting in an overall bad Customer Service process and in decreased Customer Satisfaction. Agents’ morale plays an integral role in their productivity. However, constantly leaving customer support agents (CSR) can affect others confidence significantly as a result, they may not be able to perform according to your expectations. Another major drawback of high agent attrition ratio.

Another major drawback of high agent attrition ratio is that you have to train new agents from the start and then allocate them accordingly, into your existing support teams that are dedicatedly working toward the achievement of goals. This sole change can result in slow progress toward achieving your project goals. Predominantly, because at the start, the collaboration between newly trained agents & existing CSRs will be limited & hence they may require some time to adjust properly with your old team members.

Benchmarks are critical for measuring performance, that is, if you want to determine how likely & timely would you be able to achieve your desired goals. For this reason, if your support agents keep changing continuously then the computation of several essential benchmarks such as the Average Handle Time of a support session, Customer Satisfaction & Retention Ratio, Agents Response Time, & Customer Issue Resolution Ratio would be affected greatly. Probably because, initially your new agents would not have the same capabilities as your veteran support agents and therefore, analysis of their performance in accordance with mentioned benchmarks may not provide credible data, consequently producing inconsistent results. Furthermore, in due time this will also hinder the process of evaluating the overall performance of your Contact Centre as well.

The first & perhaps most crucial prerequisite to decrease the Agent Attrition Ratio is by streamlining your initial hiring process in accordance to your goals, for instance, during interview asks questions like,

• How long are you likely to stay with us?
• Do you have any past experience pertaining to Customer Service?
• Do you like helping people?

You can ask other similar questions as well, questions that would help your identity whether the candidate is according to your expectations or not.

By putting real-effort into your hiring process, you can relieve yourself from any future pain. Moreover, apart from a streamlined hiring process, we believe in offering CSRs benefits and promotions based on their experience & performance. Primarily, because essentials like competitive salaries & bonuses based on a support agent’s performance can result in more productive and loyal agents that will eventually facilitate us in achieving our set goals much faster by putting in extra effort & dedication.

In our case, this is only a glimpse of how we hire and subsequently evaluate members of our support team. Furthermore, after the hiring process, we make sure that each new employee understands what is expected of them and how their future performance will be evaluated. By doing so, we make sure there is no friction between the management and the support staff. Likewise, because our aim is to provide world-class services to our customers, we tend to go one step further to make sure our support agents are in accordance to our expectations and that they would bring something valuable to the table in order to increase our support service capabilities even further.