Losing parts of your customer service team can be a huge burden on businesses. Here’s how to soften the blow and reduce employee turnover.
In today’s highly competitive markets, one of the distinguishing features which differentiate businesses is their level of customer service. Maintaining high customer service levels often poses challenges for business of all sizes, especially when employee turnover is prevalent. Many customer service positions have some of the lowest pay scales, compared to other positions. As such, it is common for a typical customer service employee to quit their job about once a year, and move to a different company offering better pay and benefits. There are several ways to combat employee turnover and retain experienced customer service employees, as well as ways to supplement existing staffing levels with call center outsourcing.
Hiring new employees involves numerous expenses for each person hired. Businesses have to spend money advertising open positions, recruiting, interviewing, performing background checks, drug screenings, and training qualified applicants in their new positions. For customer service positions, the average cost for attracting the right candidates and training is about $9,000 per new employee. Investing this money into employees who only remain with the company for a year, sometimes less, quickly becomes a major expense, especially for small and medium businesses.
Addressing high turnover rates is essential in order to control expenses. Your goal is to encourage employees to remain with your firm for a long period of time. Providing the right training, pay, benefits, and other incentives can help. However, for those businesses lacking the resources to do this, all is not lost, as there are cost-effective solutions, like contracting with a professional call center service to help share the load.
What can you do to retain current employees? The following are a few ways to maintain current staffing levels and reduce customer service turnover rates:
- Offer benefits and competitive pay. Employees desire health insurance, paid time off, and incentives to earn wage increases. Consider allowing employees to work from home if you are not able to offer higher wages. You can justify the lower pay, because employees do not have to commute to an office, thus saving money on transportation costs.
- Provide ongoing training and professional development. Simply training a new employee and cutting them loose is one of the fastest ways to drive them out the door. Rather, offer continued training and development to further increase their skills and abilities. As often as possible, look to promote from within. This shows employees you care about them, and it leads to much better retention rates.
- Listen to your employees. Gather feedback on a regular basis to learn exactly what problems and challenges your frontline customer service employees are experiencing. When you show interest in their concerns, it helps strengthen the relationship between employees, supervisors, and managers.
It may take time to implement these strategies, depending upon the size of your operation and resources. While you are working toward making improvements, make sure to openly communicate with your employees. If they know there are changes in process that will benefit them, they are more likely to stick around rather than actively seek to move on.
Should you find your current staffing levels insufficient to meet customer service demands, or lack resources to hire new employees, Signius Communications offers a wide range of outsourced call center support plans to help boost customer service. Contact us today to learn more!
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