Onboarding agents faster can solve one of the biggest problems faced by contact centres today – attrition. Research found that more than 1 in 4 contact centres struggle with high attrition, causing challenges like extended call queues, lower average handling time (AHT), and eventually, a decline in CSAT. Hiring superior talent and onboarding them faster can help you fill staffing gaps caused by attrition, maintaining business continuity.
Here are four steps to achieving this.
Partner with a Trusted Staffing Agency
This might sound extraneous to agent onboarding, but contact hiring success begins with your choice of a staffing agency. Attrition and turnover are inevitable realities of a contact centre workforce, and you need a reliable agency that can quickly supply top talent. The right agency will also ensure your new hires come with prior experience, minimising the learning curve when you onboard them.
Weave Training into Agent Onboarding
Combining training with onboarding might sound counter-intuitive – after all, this would only prolong the onboarding process and hold agents back from interacting with real-world customers as early as possible. However, onboarding isn’t just about getting your agent to start interacting with customers. They must actually reach the average benchmarks of your organisation, meeting their peers’ standards of AHT, CSAT, and other performance KPIs. Early training helps them reach these targets faster, making your onboarding program more efficient.
Assign a Mentor for Newly Hired Agents
Mentorship programs can be extremely helpful, as a lot of an agent’s skills are learnt on the job. Every organisation will have its own customer service strategy, a unique product catalogue, and different service channel mix. The mentor will help agents gradually gain familiarity with your contact centre processes, ramping up productivity faster.
#ProTip: Keep mentor-mentee ratios low for more efficacy.
Set Small, Achievable Goals
Clear goal-setting at the onboarding stage helps new agents to stay engaged and out in the efforts necessary to learn the requisite skills. Make sure these goals are achievable so that there is very little risk of failure, which would demotivate or disengage the agent. Monitor performance KPIs to identify the accomplishments of your new hires, and reward them accordingly.
Automate Onboarding Tasks and Make Knowledge Easily Accessible
Technology can be a major enabler for faster onboarding. To begin with, you can automate onboarding tasks that do not require any cognitive inputs – such as assigning agents their login credentials, populating HR systems with agent data, and provisioning new equipment. Further, you can also leverage technology for knowledge democratisation, making it simpler for new agents to study reports, understand the goals they are aiming for, learn more about the product(s), etc.
At the end of the day, it isn’t so much the speed of onboarding that matters, but its impact. While you try to accelerate new agent onboarding to offset any attrition, it is also important to invest in each agent’s onboarding experience to:
- Enable productivity from the get-go
- Prevent attrition risks in the first place
