As call centers grow, agents tend to change managers more frequently. This makes it difficult for managers to notice new patterns or changes in agent behaviors. What seems to be a normal number of demerits or disciplinary actions across your call center could be an extremely unusual amount for a specific agent. Using prescriptive analytics, AnswerOn identifies which agents are exhibiting unusual behavior for themselves and empowers you to intervene with the agents before they leave.
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What is People Analytics?
People Analytics helps executives make decisions about their workforce: Hiring, identifying high-performers, increasing retention, and improving employee engagement. People Analytics maximizes your workforce and optimizes your best employees.
By using data, and not relying solely on observation or gut feelings, you have a clearer understanding of long-term trends and behaviors that you otherwise might have missed.
What is the power of People Analytics?
Other solutions treat everyone the same; they take a “one-size fits all” approach to improving performance and morale. The problem is that one size DOES NOT fit all. Not every agent has the same needs or the same concerns. Incorporating sweeping initiatives across the company won’t help the employee that is missing shifts or routinely arriving late for work because they are struggling to find adequate childcare. By looking at changes in the behavior of specific employees over time, AnswerOn will isolate the employees who need special attention, instead of throwing a blanket solution over their problems.
Here are some direct effects of People Analytics:Â
- During recruitment, quantitative profiles of highly-capable employees can be used to identify and select the candidates most likely to succeed, minimizing attrition of low-tenure employees.
- During training, historical analysis and predictive analytics can help place new employees in skill sets where they will deliver higher productivity, enhancing the customer experience.
- On the floor, CSR attrition can be mitigated using AnswerOn’s analytic technologies that predict CSR churn, allowing proactive interventions that reduce replacement expenses.
Used correctly, People Analytics can make employees more productive, content at the workplace, and more satisfied with each other.
How does AnswerOn apply People Analytics?
AnswerOn has developed patent-pending technology and systems that monitor and improve engagement throughout the entire employee life-cycle.
AnswerOn’s predictive analytic models track if an agent is trending towards disengagement or attriting from the moment they start with the company all their way up the career ladder at your company. Along the way, AnswerOn watches for ways the agent is demonstrating they are unsatisfied with their job, incapable of keeping up with their schedule, were improperly trained, or any other subtle signs of a propensity to leave.
Additionally, AnswerOn pairs its model with direct interactions with agents and their opinions of the work environment through virtual focus groups (VFGs) intermittently throughout the calendar year. These qualitative findings are paired with the quantitative predictions of the model to complete the prescriptive intervention for each at-risk agent each month, giving managers the tools and the best way to address the dissatisfaction of each agent and re-engage them for more meaningful work experience.
Learn more about AnswerOn Virtual Focus Groups (VFGs).
What will People Analytics do for my call center?
On average, AnswerOn clients have seen 15 – 30% improvement in year over year attrition, 20% improvement in hiring costs, and a 15% net margin increase.
Customer B is a call center whose client sets high standards for their calls, including a sales component, and who mandates agents be highly regulated by performance metrics. As a result, Customer B sees high agent attrition and high levels of disengagement, regardless of tenure.
Rather than using another non-predictive workforce management solution, Customer B partnered with AnswerOn. We created predictive models to identify agents who were becoming disengaged and were likely to quit as a result of the high standards demanded by the client. We then used our prescriptive analytics solution to equip managers to know which types of conversations they should have with each high-risk agent before they fully disengaged and quit. These targeted conversations with at-risk agents had the secondary effect of empowering managers and improving the overall customer service experience from Customer B’s agents.
Aside from dramatic decreases in attrition measured during the project with Customer B, AnswerOn tracked three critical metrics that Customer B managed agents to: CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), FCR (First Call Resolution), and WTR (Willingness to Recommend). Over a six-month period, we measured significant improvement in CSAT of 7.70%, FCR of 2.05%, and WTR of 10.84% when comparing the scores of agents who were strategically re-engaged by their managers via AnswerOn’s proactive interventions versus those who were not engaged during the same time period, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring net revenue savings.
