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Keeping Agents On Board By Joe Fleischer
In large and small operations, turnover among agents has long been the bane of call center managers. The challenge starts with hiring the right people, but it doesn't end there. To stay afloat, call centers have to encourage them to remain.
Think a struggling economy means agents feel more secure about staying put than looking for something better? Don't count on it. As Services Editor Brendan Read has written in previous articles, businesses tend to locate call centers within unsaturated labor markets, as long as they expect to fill positions from among the local workforce.
A location's unemployment rate doesn't guarantee that agents aren't considering other jobs within the same area. This scenario applies to Royal Caribbean, which found earlier this year that competition for agents exists even in a city where unemployment has risen.
It's hard to believe the cruise company has competition. Royal Caribbean offers call center agents jobs in which they can advance quickly, plus the chance to earn free cruises. To ensure new agents didn't jump ship, the company had to help these agents feel connected with colleagues after initial training.
Changes to training also proved to be crucial at Baker & Taylor, where call center managers learned that agents didn't have to receive training by the book - or at least the same book. By allowing agents to develop proficiency with specific skills, the book wholesaler's call center reduced turnover and enabled agents to perform better.
How call centers convince agents to come aboard varies widely. Amenities like fitness rooms attract applicants, and agents may enjoy using them. But amenities alone don't retain staff. Whom you hire, and how you train them, are what determine if agents stay on board.
Royal Opportunities for Agents
Wichita, KS, is a city best known for airplanes. It's the headquarters of Cessna, Learjet and Raytheon Aircraft, as well as Boeing's manufacturing operations.
Wichita is also the point of origin for another form of travel. As we described in our case studies from our July 2000 issue, the city is home to Royal Caribbean's main call center in the US.
Agents at the center take calls for Royal Caribbean and for Celebrity Cruises, a sister cruise line. The center is open from 8 am to 10 pm on weekdays and from 9 am to 7 pm on weekends. Margo Watkins, regional human resources consultant with Royal Caribbean, estimates that between 80% and 90% of calls are from travel agents; the rest are from passengers.
The cruise company opened the Wichita center in 1997 to be a backup location. That was in case hurricanes hit Miami, FL, the city where Royal Caribbean had based its primary call center.
In September 2000, Royal Caribbean expanded the Wichita center, which had accommodated up to 350 agents. At 89,000 square feet, or nearly four times its previous size, the building houses one of the largest call centers in Wichita.
As of this fall, the center in Wichita employed 525 agents, close to double the number of agents at Royal Caribbean's center in Miami. Between the two centers, agents in Wichita now answer the majority of the calls.
An increasing number of agents came on board the Wichita center this year. To put the hiring during 2002 in context, look at the center's training classes. Each class runs four weeks, each with between 25 and 35 new hires. Agents start answering calls from customers during the last week of training.
In 2001, Royal Caribbean's center in Wichita conducted seven classes. At press time, the center had held eight classes for new hires so far in 2002, and scheduled three more for the rest of the year.
Despite the center's growth, turnover was high enough at the start of this year to prompt Watkins to change how the center hires and trains staff.
Royal Caribbean expanded its recruiting efforts beyond newspaper ads to include senior centers, colleges, career fairs, Kansas' employment Web site and the local urban league. Given the dominance of the aviation industry in Wichita, Royal Caribbean includes McConnell Air Force Base among locations from where it seeks agents.
The Wichita center offers a number of amenities, including catered lunches and a fitness center with full-time fitness instructors. If that weren't enough, agents receive a free cruise after a year on the job.
But one reason for turnover, says Watkins, stemmed from the difficulty of evaluating applicants.
"We weren't getting enough information," she says.
Royal Caribbean now conducts a three-hour assessment with each candidate. The assessment includes The DeGarmo Group's (Bloomington, IL; 309-828-4344; www.degarmogroup.com) Call Center Fit Index, a test that evaluates if a candidate is a good match for the position of call center agent. The test also determines the candidate's likelihood of staying in that job beyond a few months.
To learn how candidates respond to customers, Royal Caribbean uses Employment Technologies' (Winter Park, FL; 800-833-3279/407-865-6644; www.etc-easy.com) Call Center Simulation, software that presents candidates with examples of calls agents generally handle.
The cruise company is also keeping better track of people who apply for jobs at the Wichita center. In November 2001, Royal Caribbean established a waiting list of candidates. As the center has hired more agents, the list has shrunk to 570 applicants this fall from 1,100 in March.
The cruise company gives first priority to applicants who come with recommendations from current employees. These employees can earn $100 if the agents they refer stay with Royal Caribbean beyond a 90-day probationary period.
Watkins discovered that the 90-day time frame presented another opportunity to reduce turnover. She observed that agents felt lost in the shuffle because the agents they started out with in training classes weren't necessarily the same people they worked with.
So the center set up a voluntary buddy system, where more seasoned agents serve as guides to their less experienced colleagues. At press time, the number of mentors had grown to more than 60 from eight in March.
Agents can advance quickly within the center. Most agents can apply for promotions after six months in their positions. The exceptions are agents who handle reservations for groups; they need a minimum of a year in their positions to apply.
Besides becoming supervisors, agents can take tests to join a group called the core team. Watkins refers to this group as "the cream of the crop."
Members of the core team perform various functions. Some help with training new hires. Others maintain the distribution of calls between the centers in Miami and Wichita. Still others update agents' schedules throughout the day or assist agents on the floor. Watkins herself works closely with a core team member in human resources.
Members of the core team can also interview and take tests for answering calls for an internal hotline. Twelve people currently staff the hotline, assisting agents with questions when their supervisors aren't available.
Core team members don't strictly fulfill supervisory roles. But tenure on the team is a worthwhile experience for agents who want to move up. Watkins says that many managers have served with the team.
Judging by recent turnover rates, the new hiring and training practices are working. Turnover during August was 2.3%, down from 5.3% in January.
Low turnover is necessary because Royal Caribbean's call centers are receiving more calls than ever, especially during the peak period from November through January. In Wichita alone, agents average 80 to 90 calls a day during eight-hour shifts. In January 2002, the two centers answered one million calls, the highest monthly total ever.
Two months later, Royal Caribbean began routing inquiries from frequent cruisers to Wichita after having directed them to an outsourcer. That represents an additional 1,100 calls per day or about an extra 300,000 calls per year.
A busy call center is good news in Wichita, a city that has experienced an increase in job losses in the past year. According to the Kansas Department of Human Resources, the unemployment rate in the Wichita metropolitan area was 5.6% in August 2002, up from 4% in August 2001. Some of the layoffs this year resulted when Best Western and Spiegel closed their call centers, and when Bank of America replaced its call center with a loan fulfillment center.
Watkins doesn't believe the level of unemployment reflects on the quality of the labor force in and around Wichita. "Folks in the Midwest have a good work ethic," she says.
Even with the closures, agents do have choices, which is why low turnover is a notable achievement. Watkins observes that MCI WorldCom and T-Mobile (the former VoiceStream, now a unit of Deutsche Telekom) are among companies in the city that are still looking to hire agents.
"There are call center jobs out there," says Watkins. "We still have a lot of competition."
A New Chapter on Turnover
Retaining agents is essential at a mid-size operation like Baker & Taylor's call center, where the loss of a small number of agents during the year equates to a double-digit annual attrition rate.
Baker & Taylor, a book wholesaler based in Charlotte, NC, sells books to libraries, bookstores and on-line purveyors like Amazon. The company has four distribution centers throughout the US, each of which used to maintain its own call center. About seven years ago, recalls Keith Sanders, manager of ordering with Baker & Taylor, the book wholesaler consolidated its operation so that orders come in through one center.
Located in Commerce, GA, a rural area 65 miles from Atlanta, the center usually employs 50 agents and as many as 55 agents during peak periods. Agents receive between 1,500 and 3,000 calls per day. Mondays are often the busiest days of the week.
Orders account for about 60% of the calls. The remaining 40% are inquiries, like whether Baker & Taylor stocks certain titles.
Among managers of the center, turnover is not an issue. Sanders and four other managers have been with Baker & Taylor between 15 and 30 years.
The situation is different with agents. Sanders and his fellow managers have seen the impact of hiring and training on retaining agents, especially within the last few years.
Before summer 2000, annual turnover at the center reached 75%. Most were leaving the company rather than seeking jobs elsewhere within it. Twenty-six agents left the center between July 1999 and June 2000, the book wholesaler's fiscal year for 2000. That number was equivalent to a 40% annual attrition rate.
Lack of growth compounds the effect of turnover at the book wholesaler's call center, which hasn't conducted job fairs with on-the-spot typing tests in more than two years. As Sanders points out, the tenure of the call center managers means that opportunities for advancement within Baker & Taylor are mainly outside the center.
Fiscal year 2000 marked a turning point, as attrition among agents declined sharply from then on. During the next fiscal year, from July 2000 to June 2001, Baker & Taylor lost 16 agents. Only eight left during the following fiscal year.
What led to the drop-off in turnover? Betty Ayres and Jason Palmer, order entry supervisors with Baker & Taylor, agree that targeted hiring and specialized training has helped.
Palmer explains that the company used to hire agents to handle all types of orders, including those that arrived by fax or mail. This type of training took two months. Agents tended to leave before then.
"A lot of turnover was during the first month," says Sanders.
To reverse that trend, the book wholesaler developed a more flexible approach to hiring.
"We break down needs for departments," says Palmer. "We hire based on needs at the present time. Now, when we only train in areas we need, we can train them in two weeks."
"We ease them in to the phone," adds Ayres. "We don't scare them off to start with."
As at Royal Caribbean, agents at Baker & Taylor begin answering customers' calls during the last week of initial training. Staff with lower error rates primarily handle mail orders rather than taking calls. The mail order group does answer calls during overflow, when agents are busy speaking with customers.
Sanders says that the center's staffing level has gone down gradually each of the last few years. Two reasons for the shrinkage, he believes, are more on-line orders from customers and greater productivity among agents. Ironically, lower turnover, in his view, has helped agents become more productive.
Sanders also acknowledges that by placing agents in more specialized roles, like handling mail orders, "it makes it tougher to cover the phones."
But, he adds, lost calls have not been a problem, and the number of abandoned calls has declined since the change.
He also observes that the benefit of lower turnover outweighs the ease of being able to route calls to any agent. For example, he credits the current methods of hiring and training agents with enabling Baker & Taylor to improve in other areas, including accuracy.
"With the specialization we've done, it's helped our error rate," says Sanders.
Baker & Taylor implemented its current division of labor in February and March 2001. The error rate was previously 0.61%. A year later, the error rate was down to 0.27%.
That's a welcome development for agents. The more orders they enter and the fewer errors they make, the more they earn. Agents also earn incentives for cross-selling. In addition, the book wholesaler offers a $100 bonus when agents refer applicants who join the company and stay for six months. All told, Sanders calculates, incentives represent between 5% and 20% of agents' pay.
This summer, Baker & Taylor's call center made another adjustment in training. As in the past, supervisors monitor live calls between agents and customers. What's new is that supervisors now listen to conversations of agents who don't report to them, although agents' direct supervisors continue to provide feedback. The aim, explains Sanders, is to monitor agents based on points of view other than those of their immediate bosses.
Supervisors usually monitor calls from their desks rather than by sitting next to agents. Yet, as Ayres notes, supervisors' desks are on the call center floor. So when agents need answers to questions, Ayres says, "they have someone they can reach out and grab."
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