We surveyed 71 contact center executives–at last week's NorthEast Contact Center Annual Vendor Expo–to hear what their challenges are with shrinkage and what they've done to try to reduce it's effects on their center. It turns out:
- 93% of executives feel it is important to reduce shrinkage
- Absenteeism is the biggest challenge (impacting 61% of executives), with attrition and stress tying for second place (impacting 44%)
- 83% would be likely to purchase a cost-effective and easy way to reduce shrinkage
Read below to see the full survey detail, find out what these executives' biggest challenge is and why, and to find out what they are already doing to try to reduce shrinkage:
How important is it to you to reduce shrinkage?
Extremely Important 61%
Somewhat Important 32%
Neutral 7%
Not At All Important 0%
What challenges negatively affect your business the most (Executives could select multiple items)?
Absenteeism 61%
Call Escalation 35%
Attrition 44%
Drama 31%
Stress 44%
Medical/FMLA Leaves 27%
Medical Claims 0%
What one challenge would be most beneficial for you to fix? Why?
- Attrition (11): retention, building a tenured staff, setting job expectations, while managing a business with contractors, currently we turnover our staff more than once a year
- Absenteeism (9): we currently schedule to projected call volumes without extra bodies, any absenteeism severely affects our service level.
- Stress (9): with work load–would lead to happy reps, reps with stress impact all the above areas, less stress daily, stress reduction has a beneficial effect on all of the call center challenges
- Call escalation (6), call backs
- Drama (3)
- Morale (3): I believe it causes absenteeism and lower service
- Medical/FMLA/LOA (3)
- Training (3): no time available, user base/usability, competency
- Staffing (3): be able to find qualified employees, recruiting
- Drama (2): teaching a level of professionalism is important
- Creating parity in results between multiple sites. Disparity in site results creates distress between operations and creates culture of distrust.
- Poor work ethic
- Multi-skill environment with scheduling too manual
- Motivation and encouragement in repetitive activity/process for agents–all of which are long term (limited skill set) employees.
- American perception of non-American agents
- Instilling optimism
- Our contractor vs employee model (permanent)
- Helping individual contributors to stay engaged and take ownership of problems
- Managing diversity
- Making sure everyone enjoys their job
- Schedule adherence: people need to be at the right place at the right time, to be able to better handle volumes to meet business needs
- Change management
- Manage lost time
- Buy-in
- Dropped calls
- Staff's ability to make the call to send issues out
- Employee satisfaction
- Work environment
- Customer satisfaction
- Quality consistency
- Expectation for call turnover from other departments
If there were a cost-effective and easy way to reduce shrinkage, how likely would you be to purchase it?
Extremely Likely 9%
Very Likely 35%
Moderately Likely 39%
Slightly Likely 13%
Not At All Likely 3%
N/A 1%
How have you already tried to reduce shrinkage?
- In a call center it is a daily business
- By various means
- Kaizen
- Increased focus on forecasting and scheduling as well as educating the team on impact of absenteeism and lack of adherence
- We have hired direct/full time employees vs hiring through an agency
- Hiring temp agents
- Always are trying
- By keeping our employees engaged and challenged. We are a talent feeder group for the rest of the company so the challenge is we are a continually green workforce. It's a good position to be in.
- Coaching (2) and speaking with associates
- Lunch and learn programs, EAP, flex schedules, open door policy/culture, on site nurse
- By fostering positive group dynamics
- Incentive programs, rewarding perfect attendance
- We bring in interns during all semesters to work at company in hope of them staying
- Job sharing, training
- Communication (2)
- Mostly around scheduling
- Pay for performance bonus goals
- By focusing on the important things that have continued to make us successful, team building, driving development, one-on-ones
- More training and coaching
- Work improvement
- Track what agents are doing during their non-phone time
- Advanced call routing
- Keeping people engaged
- Through incentive and recognition programs
- Have discussed, but have no immediate action plans
- I am more concerned with easing stress and drama
- Hiring/interview process
- Planning to overstaff
- We are a sales center and motivate reps by incentive to be available for incoming calls during high call volumes
- Red Prairie WMS for inventory and video surveillance
- We have not tried to reduce shrinkage (6)
We offer a cost-effective and easy way to reduce shrinkage and increase morale in your contact center. Respond to this note for a 10-minute conversation to learn more about how to reduce shrinkage by 50%.
All my best,
Jacqueline