Employee measures
Unfortunately, many lists of call center KPIs ends with the above measures. However, it’s vitally important to include measures of success with one more stakeholder group – the frontline staff. Here are two final measures in our guide that address how happy the workforce is and these are critical measures since a happy workforce works more efficiently, provides better service, and stays around longer.
Staff turnover/retention
One way to measure the satisfaction of your workforce is to look at the percentage of staff who are leaving. There can be some telling information in these numbers and you will want to track and analyze the turnover rates in many ways.
Look at the rate associated with different call types, as it may be more stressful or less satisfying to handle certain types of calls. Look at turnover by team to see if there are any supervisory influences in keeping people or driving them away.
And you’ll definitely want to look at the level of performance of the people leaving. If it’s primarily the worst performers leaving, turnover is not such a bad thing, but if it’s your better performers leaving the center, it may be time to re-examine your compensation, recognition programs, and career path opportunities to see what’s preventing the retention of these staff.
Employee satisfaction scores
The final metric on our list is one of the most important ones. We stated earlier that the one metric most closely associated with customer satisfaction was first call resolution rate. However, running a very close second in terms of correlation with customer satisfaction is employee satisfaction. The happier your employees are, the better they’re treating your customers.
Once again, it’s important here to do your own employee satisfaction survey, as the general company one from HR (assuming they do one at all), may not address all the important areas that impact the satisfaction of your call center staff.
An employee satisfaction survey directed at call center staff should ask questions in the following areas: demographics, nature of the work, training and development, performance metrics, work schedules, physical work environment, health and wellness, supervisory support, compensation, and general attitudes toward the center and company.
You will want to perform these surveys regularly and share overall results with the staff so they can see how areas of concern are being addressed.
Penny Reynolds is founding partner of Nashville, TN-based The Call Center School, a consulting and education company.