Solutions to turnover problem
“Our contact centre is a complex set-up that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and caters for 48 different lines of business across varying activities,” says Kay Vittee, GM of contact centre sales and services operations at Absa.
Activities vary from general services to sales, cross-selling and internet support for transactional activity and products handled by different teams of agents, she says.
Vittee says 93% of customer interaction is by telephone and the balance is by e-mail, web and fax.
She says the call centre uses 20% interactive voice response and 80% agent-assisted response, and customers are given the choice.
“A year ago we became concerned because we were experiencing abnormal levels of staff turnover, mostly due to shift work.”
She says the company tracked exit interviews, held staff forums and surveyed employees. It became apparent that the profiles of the people working certain shifts were not right. The research highlighted that team leaders were 85% focused on administration and were not spending enough time with the agents, who felt a lack of support.
Another problem was that the technology did not allow agents to access a single view of the customer across different services, she says.
“We finished the exercise last April and immediately started to tweak the processes to address the problems that had been identified.”
As part of the restructuring, the company introduced flexible scheduling that allowed agents to state their preference for the hours they worked instead of allocating shifts.
The team-leader role was redesigned so these people could focus on coaching, supporting and leading their teams, and dealing with people issues, and a supportive role was created to relieve them of the administrative burden, she says.
Coaches were brought in to teach applied competence and business skills to team leaders and management, says Vittee.
“We also implemented a people centred programme to equip agents to recognise the emotional needs of customers and interact with them with more empathy.”
She says Absa has reduced staff turnover by nearly 37% and lowered absenteeism by 22% as a result of the restructuring.
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