Tackling high turnover in call centers with Tenacity

High turnover is a constant issue for call centers. A 2015 study revealed that employee turnover across the board is between 30-45%.

When compared to the average turnover rate in all industries, this number is at least double, and up to three times as much as what other professions experience every year. And this can pose a problem for employers.

High turnover rate means that more money is spent and lost training new employees, money that would be better spent on other aspects of the business. In addition to this, constantly having some capacity of low-experience employees may end up hurting the business and driving away customers who don’t want to deal with rookies.

What are the reasons for this turnover? There are quite a few, including attrition and absenteeism. The typical call center environment doesn’t always inspire the best in people, and many see it as a stop-gap between school years or before greater things and this can lead to presenteeism.

The employees aren’t completely to blame, though. A case can be made that call center jobs don’t help themselves, and so it’s no wonder they witness so many people passing through.

What can be done to stop the high turnover in call centers?

The thing is that turnover is generally unavoidable. Even if you have the greatest business ever seen, there will always be someone who is just not right for the job. There are a number of articles and blogs dedicated to teaching managers how to halt the revolving door of employees and improve the productivity and happiness of those still there, but there are few actual resources to assist managers trying their hardest to retain as many faces as possible.

Tenacity, founded in 2012 by Ron Davis, is a platform designed to reduce attrition and absenteeism using employee engagement solutions to give call centers a better quality of life. Tenacity believes that too much money has been spent trying to solve the problem of overly high turnover within call centers, and has been wasted on things like training days, skills routing, and gamification. It believes that those searching for the solution have forgotten the most important ingredient: the human aspect.

A spinoff of MIT, Tenacity uses its research on data science and social dynamics to make the call center environment an all around better place. Unlike other company training sessions it doesn’t involve long, often boring meetings or time wasted on team building exercises that no one wants to engage in.

Instead, it utilizes an easy-to-use, cloud-based software that offers resilience training, targeted team building, peer coaching, and social rewards that reduces agent stress, leading to healthier and happier team members.

Businesses that have used the service claim that Tenacity resulted in a 12% drop in absenteeism, 33% lower attrition, and allowed for an average of $350,000 of new revenue opportunity. A lot more effective than Taco Tuesdays and Casual Fridays, it seems.

Whilst turnover in call centers will probably never end, there’s only so much abuse one person can take daily before he or she snaps. As someone who’s worked in a call center before, sometimes, the angry calls are the most entertaining part of the job, but it needs to be more than that.