I was chatting with a longtime friend of mine last week and the subject turned to human resources, or human capital management, in the contact center. Kevin Hegebarth is the vice president of marketing at GMT Corporation in Atlanta and has spent most of his career in the contact center business. So I often get into business-related topics with Kevin even when we chat informally.
Kevin’s position is that the proper selection and hiring of employees in the contact center is a key, and often overlooked, aspect of a successful workforce optimization strategy. He argues that unless a contact center ensures that the right people are coming through the door, and provides those people with an ongoing workforce development program designed to keep those key people in the organization, other workforce improvement or optimization strategies will suffer. Sound logic. I can’t argue with it.
Recruitment, selection and hiring in the contact center has always been, in my mind, something of a conundrum. Agent turnover has always been the bane of the industry, yet the industry at large seems unwilling to address the problem. A few years ago a company that was highly successful in helping companies in other industries with recruiting and hiring strategies started a division that focused on the contact center. I worked with this company for a year trying to get the attention of contact center human resources professionals. This company had excellent software that had been tested, honed, refined and used successfully in other industries for years. It was a proven product based upon sound human resources and psychological principles.
Within a year the company was out of the contact center business. In fact, the two principals of the division threw up their hands in frustration and, I kid you not, moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands never to see the contact center industry again. The industry simply would not buy into the need to carefully screen potential employees to ensure a proper fit in the organization. Instead the overriding strategy seems to be to keep a steady stream of warm bodies coming through the door so there is an ample stockpile of available agents to replace the average 40 percent of the workforce that turns over each year.
I think Kevin’s heart is in the right place and I like GMT’s position on the importance of human capital management. I wonder, though, if their efforts to spotlight recruitment and selection in the contact center will fall on deaf ears as other efforts have in the past, or if in the evolution of the customer service industry the contact center is finally ready to address the issue of agent turnover and embrace a solution.
I’m still at a loss to understand how the industry in general has become so complacent when it comes to personnel turnover rates. Is high turnover so deeply ingrained in the contact center industry that it is considered unavoidable? Is it a unique aspect of the customer service industry that considered a necessary cost of doing business? Is it a simple fact of business life that is too much trouble to try to change?
We welcome your comments on the issue of human resources practices and agent turnover rates in the contact center industry. Just click the link below and tell us what you think.
