A major component to a business' success or failure is the relationship it has with its new and existing clientele. CEOs and business leaders, as a result, are putting a high value on contact centers and call centers like never before. Contact centers have evolved significantly in this digital age; once just phones ringing, contact centers have now become strategic communication hubs with a diverse number of channels for customer service - and the proof is in the numbers. According to a recent Forrester report, over the course of the last three years, self-service web activities rose 12%, users utilizing online chat grew by 24%, and community usage increased by 25%. It's clear according to this report that the digital age is only going to further evolve contact centers, but how do we retain those talented Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) as the evolution continues? Retention rates continue to be a major pain point for contact centers around the world. Due to high stress and low pay, turnover is extremely high at roughly 40%! This free white paper will tout the various ways to increase employee retention and save money while doing so. By implementing these white paper strategies, you may find yourself saving $2,000-$3,000 each month just by keeping those talented CSRs at your organization.

1. adeccousa.com
Today, customers expect the same experience across all of a company’s
communication channels. A company reinforces its brand perception every
time a customer interacts with it, whether in-person at a store or over any of
the communication channels that the company offers. These channels include
voice, email, chat, web self-service as well as social channels such as forums
and popular sites.
As a result, with the advent of social computing technologies like blogs,
online ratings and reviews, wikis, microblogs, and internet-based communities,
customers are able to rapidly and widely share their opinions about products
and service experiences. They wield influence over the reputation of corporate
brands more than ever before. Customers now control your brand.
Thus, no matter the size or industry, organizations with the most modern contact
center tools, which meet customer preferences, are best positioned to achieve
the gold standard — solid customer relationships.
As contact centers evolve,
so do retention methods.
For most organizations, success
begins and ends with the customer.
Overall customer satisfaction can be
improved simply by knowing customers —
how they prefer to communicate with the
organization, what they deem important
in terms of service and product choice,
and when and why they are dissatisfied.

2. 2
The call center industry has changed greatly
in the past thirty years. Pioneered in America,
it arose out of a need to centralize customer
service operations to save money in the
eighties. As the economy improved and
business boomed, competition became
fierce — and customers more demanding.
Companies used call centers to differentiate
themselves with excellent customer service,
in the hope that handling customer concerns
quickly and efficiently would encourage
brand loyalty.
Today, by interacting with customers
at every communications touchpoint,
contact centers are evolving to become
the communications hub for brands.
According to a 2013 Forrester report that
spans all demographics, while voice is
still the primary communication channel
used, it is quickly followed by self-service
channels, and digital channels such as
chat and email. Channel usage rates are
also quickly changing: there has been a 12
percent rise in web self-service usage, a 24
percent rise in chat usage, and a 25 percent
increase in community usage for customer
service in the past three years.
For 2014, managing these multiple channels
to improve the customer experience and
strengthen their bonds of loyalty are among
the top priorities of large consumer-brand
organizations around the world. Expect
customer service organizations to better
align their channel strategy this year to
support their company’s customers’ needs.
Contact center customer support functions
must evolve to become relationship platforms,
with a focus on building personalized
and collaborative customer interactions.
The best contact centers provide a consistent,
branded and contextual experience across
all media and channels. In today’s “any-
where, anytime” customer-focused business
environment, operating a high-performance
contact center is more important than ever.
Contact centers connect
with customers at every touchpoint.
Channel usage rates are quickly changing. In the past three years:
2% rise in web self-service usage | 24% rise in chat usage | 25% increase in community usage

3. 3adeccousa.com
First call resolution (FCR) has become one
of the most important metrics used today
to measure the performance of the contact
center, a seismic measurement shift in the
customer care environment, for two very
important reasons.
First is basic economics. By reducing
the number of repeat calls by only five
percentage points, from 25 percent to 20
percent, an inbound contact center with 250
agents can save approximately $230,000
annually, or the equivalent of seven full-time
agents. This analysis considers only direct
labor costs. Factoring in network services
costs, seat licenses, service contract fees,
hardware, training, internal IT support costs,
facilities, and supervision adds substantially
to potential savings. In addition, repeat calls
often require supervisor or subject matter
expert intervention, at a substantially higher
labor cost than agents.
If the customer is happy, that is what
companies care about most. Call resolution
results are far more important than measure-
ments such as average talk time, which
today seem outdated.
The second important reason for FCR
is customer satisfaction. Callers do not
like having to make repeated efforts to get
answers to their questions. According to
research conducted by the SQL Group,
customer satisfaction drops 15 percent
with each callback.
And with today’s worldwide communications
hub, what happens in contact centers can
quickly go viral, demanding that issues be
addressed quickly rather than be dragged
through the social media mud, which costs
a company valuable resources like time
and reputation.
First call resolution — the key performance metric.
One great example of social media
customer service gone right is the
Cincinnati Metro. Mostly working
through complaints via Twitter, the
Cincinnati Metro is quick to respond,
immediately focuses on conflict
resolution, and is genuine in their
apology.
For example, a customer tweeted
about a high-pitched tone continu-
ously screeching throughout her bus
ride due to a new fare box installa-
tion. The Cincinnati Metro responded
in a timely manner, asking questions
— “What high pitch tone? Do you
mean the beep when it accepts
the fare or the noise it makes when
it rejects a bill?” — and working
with the woman to get additional
details to solve the problem.
In the end, the woman shared
which bus was having the issue,
then thanked the Cincinnati Metro
for taking the time to address
and fix it for her.
This is only one example of many
for Cincinnati Metro’s customer
service success stories on social
media, which gives them a very
high approval rating with their
customers. Just remember, the key
to great customer service is respond-
ing quickly. This doesn’t just mean
picking up the phone, but also
answering your patrons on social
media and other review sites
across the web.
Social media:
another outlet for
great customer service.1
FCR
1 Boot Camp Digital, Boot Camp Case Study Metro. http://www.scribd.com/doc/76283849/Social-
Media-Case-Study-How-Cincinnati-Metro-uses-Twitter-to-Handle-Complaints. Accessed Jan. 28, 2014.

4. 4
Look for creative thinkers.
New assessment metrics show that
the most important quality to look for
in a call center employee is creativity.
• Individuals with high creativity
scores tend to stay around longer.
• Creative people find unique ways
to solve problems.
• They are less likely to be frustrated
by the daily issues of their callers
and more likely to try to figure out
ways to solve them.
• They look at customer service issues
as new challenges.
• The variety of the calls, complaints
and problems are exciting to them.
It allows them to resolve problems
and exceed customer expectations.
Given the changes in contact centers, the
role of the contact center agent is changing.
As more mainstream customers adopt
self-help, callers tend to have more
challenging issues.
Thus, the call for agents who can juggle
several responsibilities at once is becoming
louder. These days, clients have higher
expectations, which means agents may
have to answer an inbound phone call
and provide service while doing a web
chat and answering an email. Further
complicating matters, some agents also
must be prepared to act as Tier 1 technical
support for the website itself.
With first-call resolution taking center stage,
customer support agents need to scale
several notches up. If a question is routed
to a support rep it is likely to be a compli-
cated one, and they must be prepared
to do heavy troubleshooting.
As call centers work on guiding customers to the right channel based
on the complexity and time sensitivity of interactions, how does a company
hire the right person who will stay in the job and make an impact?
In The Wall Street Journal’s “Meet the
New Boss: Big Data,”2
writer Joseph
Walker explains how Xerox is empha-
sizing personality and creativity when
making mass hiring decisions:
“After a half-year trial that cut attrition
by a fifth, Xerox now leaves all hiring
for its 48,700 call-center jobs to software
that asks applicants to choose between
statements like: “I ask more questions
than most people do” and “People
tend to trust what I say.”
Xerox discovered that personality
was the most accurate indicator
of who would remain working at their
call centers. Because a high percentage
of call center employees (relative to
other professions) quit in the first six
months, hiring for personality dramati-
cally increased the ROI not only on their
recruitment budget but also their $5,000
per employee training investment.
Xerox finds personality
and creativity are
vital retention factors.
Finding the long-term
call center agent.
2 Joseph Walker, “Meet the New Boss: Big Data.” Wall Street Journal Online, September 12, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443890304578006252019616768.

5. 5adeccousa.com
The costs of turnover.
Low-cost methods to retain top talent.
Identifying the right talent.
Low retention rates start with hiring the right
people. Of course, it’s difficult to ensure that
every person that walks through the door
is the right fit, but you can create a proactive
strategy to hire someone with great skills
and the right cultural mindset.
Skill assessments.
Creating an assessment for applicants
or pre-employees to take that covers their
competency and level of comfort in impor-
tant areas of their role — such as customer
service, phone etiquette, social skills, and
data entry — may help weed out the “okay”
fit from the “best” fit.
Behavioral and
work preference analysis.
This analysis is the place to ask those
“what if” questions based on real-life
scenarios that could happen during the
workday. This is a great tool to assess
behavioral features like compassion,
creativity, problem solving and empathy
— all important qualities in the world
of customer service.
Cultural index analysis.
To effectively manage talent, it is important
to know their needs, motivation, personal
goals and drive. It’s even more important
to make sure that these things align with
the needs and goals of your company’s
contact center team. A cultural index
analysis is a great way to find and analyze
these things prior to hiring an applicant.
Realistic job previews.
As is with most situations in life, we feel
the most comfortable going into something
when we are prepared and aware of the
expectations that will follow. Allow your
pre-employees to get a feel for the job
at hand — mock phone calls (both positive
and negative), mock emails and even a
day of shadowing one of your best CSRs
could really help an applicant understand
expectations and decided whether or not
this is the perfect fit for them.
To prevent attrition, many companies are turning to innovative hiring practices to keep agents on the job.
Following are some of the most successful ways to retain valuable call agents without significantly driving up personnel costs.
3 Phillips, Jack and Natalie Petouhoff. Recruiting and Training Call Center Employees. Virginia: American Society for Training and Development, 2001.
As quoted in, “Call Center Rep Attrition,” AnswerOn, http://answeron.com/solutions-2/customer-service-rep-attrition. Accessed Nov. 13, 2013.
Staff turnover is one of the biggest problems
that call center managers face today —
it impacts both costs and quality of service.
The Robert Francis Group Inc., an advisory
firm, estimated that replacing a CSR costs
between $10,000-$15,000, conservatively.
That does not include the biggest costs —
reduced customer satisfaction and business
because of inexperienced reps.
According to ContactBabel, a leading
analyst firm for the contact center industry,
the average agent turnover rate in the call
center industry is close to 40 percent, making
the total cost associated with turnover
vast indeed.
In an Inside CRM interview (April 8, 2008)
held by writer Pam Baker with Matt Katz,
vice president of business consulting
at Merced Systems, now owned by NICE
(NASDAQ: NICE), Mr. Katz says, “It costs
$10,000 to $15,000 in hard expenses
to replace a single call center worker.
However, a company saves from $2,000
to $3,000 for every month a single staffer
is retained.”
With such high industry attrition rates, CSR
replacement can be very costly for large
contact centers. Another industry report3
gives an example of a 1,000-seat contact
center with an annualized attrition rate of 120
percent. It gives a low estimate of recruiting,
hiring and training costs at $4,000 per CSR,
resulting in $4.8 million spent yearly on
CSR replacement. In this scenario, if agent
attrition could be decreased by only 10
percent, the contact center would save
$480,000 annually.
So, how do companies combat call-center
churn? The Robert Francis Group report
suggests ensuring salaries are at least in
the 75th percentile for similar jobs in the
area. However, money is far from the only
consideration. Surveys have found that,
while pay and location are usually the main
reasons for taking a call center job, people
decide to leave for many other reasons.
Typically, voluntary turnover can come
as a result of job monotony, lack of career
advancement, poor management, over-
supervision, lack of empowerment to solve
customer issues, lack of control of personal
schedules, frustration with the toolset, and
the stress of dealing with irate customers.

6. 6
Recognize good work.
Praise when a rep does a particularly good
job is one of the most powerful motivators.
An agent who handles a difficult caller
well or who unravels a knotty problem
for a customer deserves public recognition.
Public, because it not only helps the agent,
but encourages others to do likewise.
Giving small positive reinforcements often
is better than offering big praises infrequently.
Agents should be constantly reminded
that their personal contributions are valued.
Little things mean a lot.
Offer family perks.
With workers putting in longer hours at
the office, motivational rewards have more
resonance if they can be shared with friends
and family. Everything from inviting families
to company picnics to offering free movie
passes when the call agent works late are
very popular, according to Jack McElaney,
vice president of sales and client services
at E Communication Advantage.
Allow flextime.
Burnout is a huge problem for underpaid
and overworked call agents. To relieve the
pressures that lead to burnout, consider
being more lenient on time issues. Flexible
schedules and added paid time off for
excellent performance are great incentives
for call agents to pull all those extra hours.
Eliminate boredom.
Boredom is deadly. A bored rep is an
unproductive rep, and one who probably
is not going to be around very long. Cross-
training is one way to combat boredom.
By teaching reps several different jobs and
switching them around regularly, monotony
is relieved and agents feel fresh.
Incentives and rewards.
Incentives and rewards can improve
employee-retention rates by boosting
agents’ morale and giving them a tangible
reason to stay with an organization (other
than a regular paycheck). Some ideas:
bonuses for perfect attendance, compen-
sation programs based on pay-for-perfor-
mance and annual process-improvement
programs that reward suggestions
which lead to increased performance.
Career pathways.
Call-center jobs are often perceived to be
career dead ends. Giving agents a defined
promotion pathway that encourages them
to increase their job grade and salaries
by providing outstanding performance
can dispel this notion. Employees who feel
that they have a profitable future with their
organization are less likely to jump ship.
Team environment.
Employees who work in teams are generally
more loyal. Team spirit can be built through
special events (such as picnics, awards
ceremonies and training sessions), enhanced
communication (including employee intra-
nets and newsletters) and a positive work
atmosphere (such as a clean facility, modern
equipment, and fair work rules and practices).
Having even a few of these
processes in place may
help nip turnover in the bud.
Contact center retention strategies.

7. 7adeccousa.com
Eliminate stress at the root.
Ask any call center agent what the most
difficult part of his or her job is, and high
stress levels will be the most likely response.
Stress can be caused by management,
fellow employees, policies, processes,
or other conditions. Identify what is causing
stress. Formal surveys, focus groups, and
employee exit interviews are the most
direct and best way to get honest feed-
back. Ensure these are done anonymously
to get the most accurate results.
By actively dealing with these causes,
engagement levels with agents are
enhanced and a company shows it is
thinking about them and trying to improve
the environment in which they work.
This makes reps feel more appreciated
and, combined with lowering their stress,
should lower turnover rates.
Constructive personalized feedback.
Providing constructive feedback on a one-
to-one basis may be more costly initially,
but it will provide the personal attention your
agents’ desire, while improving their skills
and effectiveness faster. The extra invest-
ment in personalized feedback should
pay off with improved call center efficiency
and reduced agent turnover.
Screening and testing
A call center that is experiencing excessive
personnel turnover should take a close
look at its screening and testing procedures.
Pre-hire screening can significantly reduce
turnover by uncovering individuals with a
history of flitting from job to job. Additionally,
pre-hire testing can uncover candidates that
are unsuitable to fill vacant agent positions
and are not likely to last long on the job.
The bottom line.
Agents need to be empowered with the
knowledge and abilities needed to fully
satisfy customers. An agent’s advantage
over IVR or self-service is his or her ability
to “think like a customer” and adapt to the
situation at hand. When agents can think
critically — yet swiftly — through customer
problems and deliver resolutions that
strengthen the relationship for both
the brand and the customer, company
communications goals are met.
For more information on hiring
and retention strategies, contact
your local Adecco representative
or visit adeccousa.com.

8. ©2014 Adecco
877.8.adecco
Adecco Staffing U.S. is the nation’s leading provider
of recruiting and workforce solutions.
We partner with small and mid-sized businesses, as well as Fortune 500 companies across all major industries.
With over 450 career centers and 25,000 clients nationwide, we’re able to leverage the power of our network
to connect more than 70,000 workers to the best job opportunities across the country, making us one of America’s
largest employers. Reach out to us today to discuss a workforce solution for your organization.
adeccousa.com