As a company, it is less than ideal to see your good team members walk away in search of better opportunities. This includes the 24/7 Operations Teams, who don’t always get the attention they require.
It is estimated that the support and IT service industry experiences close to 40% turnover on a yearly basis. Ineffective employee retention efforts, qualified agents who nonetheless lack customer service expertise, and the career goals of professionals who view such positions as an interim step are the leading causes for employee attrition.
Challenge:
A major concern for companies managing 24/7 Operations Teams is that they are unable to retain them for a longer period of time.
When your employees see customer operations support as a temporary step on their career path as opposed to a goal, service levels are affected significantly – the constant turnover makes it difficult to generate reliable metrics because so many people are either training or shifting frequently, leading to inconsistent delivery.
Several factors contribute to this, particularly:
- Lack of growth opportunities – The roles oftentimes do not often have an internal career path – they are entry-level jobs that initially require minimal input yet must still be carried out effectively. Because of the limited nature of this role, there is no upward mobility.
- Lack of knowledge base – One of the repercussions of a high attrition rate is that it is difficult to retain and transfer knowledge internally. This is amplified when there isn’t a set of knowledge base for the team to draw data from.
- Lack of flexibility – A high attrition rate means that you have to keep repeating training cycles frequently. A natural consequence of this is that you have fewer team members to shuffle around weekly work schedules. This contributes to the lack of flexibility that companies are stuck in when managing these teams.
Opportunity:
Companies spend a lot to replace even a single agent.
In addition to the costs of recruiting, onboarding, and training, there are indirect costs as well, such as a period of limited productivity, overtime expenses due to vacancy backfill, and loss of institutional memory.
Unsurprisingly, these costs can have significant adverse effects. For instance, the higher the rate of turnover, the lower the first response rate tends to be. Same goes for the customer satisfaction rate.
Considering the additional time investment required, setting up such a team internally can be very complex and time-consuming, potentially diverting resources and attention away from other critical projects, which may not be worth the effort in the long run. Especially in times of recession, focus needs to be prioritised on the most important elements of your business.
Solution:
To boost incentive and retention potential, we consider growth opportunities as a valuable variable in the team. So, we designed roles to enable these individuals to grow within their roles.
- Junior Monitoring Agent
- Senior Monitoring Agent
- Team Lead
- Regional Team Lead
In addition, we solve the lack of information flow through access to tailored resources. To address this challenge, we have carefully developed and built a knowledge base over time that we use when training the team. We are equipped with software to store the material, along with learning and development systems in place to assist with managing the information. As a result of implementing this system, we also enable team members to perform their job remotely on a flexible schedule that can be adjusted every week.
Our solution offers a streamlined onboarding process that allows us to train and activate new employees with a fast turnaround time, allowing for flexibility within the team. We provide scalability, which enables businesses to adapt to growing demand or workload with minimal incremental growth while simultaneously multiplying revenue.
Result:
Employee retention is directly related to team reliability, which subsequently impacts customer satisfaction.
Ideally, you want your business up and running 365/24/7 with no downtime and for issues to be flagged promptly and solved without the customer ever noticing any discomfort–In a perfect world, you even want all of this to happen without you ever having to intervene directly yourself.
Taking a proactive approach to 24/7 Operations Team optimization is a dependable way to decrease attrition. From training to knowledge retention, our platform enhances the transfer of expertise within the team and contributes to your productivity, increases your operational efficiency, and helps improve your bottom line.
We provide all of that for you: a complete, hassle-free solution to make sure your business runs up to par and your clients experience zero friction with your systems – we already have the tools, processes, and expertise in place to seamlessly upscale client service and adapt to your business’ growth and expansion.
Posted in: Allen Outsource / Client
