Customer Service Department of any company matters worth more than others. Each individual of this front desk is in fact the company’s as well as its brand’s ambassador. Customer experience is the lifeline to brands and no one else but customer service department representatives know the pulse rate of client’s feedback and sentiments. Our live chat HR Department verily focuses on agents’ turnover for we know if estimated in cost of investment and that of priceless customer satisfaction, it gets alarming. It involves training cost, hiring cost and team spirit. So we strive holding onto our employees, especially the skilled ones.

Before going to calculate this metric lets’ ponder over the reasons for employee turnover. Unlike software and automation services, agents are living beings and most of the time the reasons behind their run down are emotional or financial. Common reasons behind agents’ turnover:

• Negative working aura
• Obstructive management style
• Monotonous routines or lack of workload diversity
• Constant stress
• Inadequate training
• Low pay scale

We usually measure this metric annually but it can be done quarterly or monthly, depending on how much this evaluation is needed. Its formula is:

Suppose a company loses 35 agents within a specific time period and has 100 active employees, its turnover calculation will be:

It can further be evaluated as bad turnover rate; employees that are either fired or quit the company entirely. Let’s say a company has 40 employees leave: 10 of them are promoted within the company (termed as good turnover), 25 voluntarily resigned and 5 are fired. Its formula is:

The difference between general and good and bad turnover can be seen by comparing these two graphs. It can help us find out whether our turnover rate is normal or alarming.

Our Turnover graph:

Good and Bad Turnover graph:

The graphs depict a relatively steady bad turnover, but at the same side shows that the organization is headed towards feeding talent in it too.

Another way that we adapt to look into turnover rate is comparing ours with that of average in the market. For it we gather data from chamber of commerce and make a brief analysis. No matter what benchmark we opt for, our aim is to keep this rate at normal.

Our team, especially the professional ones really matter to us. A good agent is an outcome of months’ guidelines, trainings and above all humanly bonding, so we don’t feel like losing them anyway. For retaining them we keep improving our set up in accordance with our needs to sustain a sound front-line force. We do it following these steps:

We go for the most suitable hiring that may fit our live chat support as fiddle. We know being online with active chats of around 4-5 customers is a matter of being patient, friendly and of course affluent in the language. Our recruiting process is a time taking one or two hour evaluation of the candidate through online language testing with follow-up of online interview and then a face-to-face questionnaire. We keep testing our top performers through different assessments round the year and come up with required criteria for judging the candidate’s personality traits.

An old quote says, “People aren’t motivated by companies; they’re motivated by leaders.” We take it as a key to train our agents. Our mangers and analytics are the ones with sound knowledge and personalities. They rightly influence the team while training them for developing soft skills, platform skills, product/service knowledge, writing (chatting) skills and technical support tips. We believe that great expectations from an untrained recruit are but opening an exit way for him.

Our live chat floors are healthy, competitive and professional grounds for the agents. We don’t make them feel as if they are working in a silo. We have an internal chat tool that helps agents bid greetings to each other, discuss critical queries and sort out suggestions from analytics while being interactive with customers’ chats.

Employees turnover process is an outcome of monotonous routines too, so we simply burnout those routines. We keep switching our agents in various capacities in different customer service channels i.e. emails, call, social, in-app etc. This versatile experience keeps the agents happy and active, and on the other side enables them to hone their skills to adapt to customer needs.

We offer convenient timings to our agents that suit them best. Our 24/7 working routine facilitates them to opt for any shift that goes right with their personal schedules. We also give relaxation to agents to switch their shifts with each other if needed. We have got an extra support team as backup to fill the absentees as it is one of the foremost issues of live chat set ups.

We consistently take feedback from our front-line force for they are the right bearers of customers’ happiness as well as frustrations. To fix the route problems of our agents and keeping their issues rightly addressed we relay their observations in closed-loop form and make them connected with upstream staff. This way we establish a culture of agents’ ownership that makes them feel more than spinning wheels or transmitters.

No matter what tough campaigns we are working on and how much high our targets are, we have adapted to a humanly empathetic office culture. It stems the personality of our company as well as its leaders which ultimately passes along to every new hire. It affects everything from office ambience, attires, employees’ outings and lunches, workplace interactions to the way our façade force interacts with clients and each other.

By staying in touch with our teams’ panics and pleasures we get a strong idea of how it is performing. It helps us improve our service level, retain our best workers and maintain a sound level of employee turnover.