Diagnosing Employee Burnout and Preventing Attrition
Intradiem’s revolutionary Agent Burnout Indicator predicts attrition among contact center agents with more than 80% accuracy
Everyone knows the job of a contact center agent is stressful. Schedules are tight. Each minute is measured, categorized and judged. Breaks are determined by the clock, not by need. Customers—some more patient than others—seek answers that aren’t always easy to provide. Support is not always what it should be, and too many of the administrative tasks that come with the job have to be done manually.
Not surprisingly, attrition is common. Rates of 30% or more are typical in most contact centers, and some operations turn over their entire agent team in some years. Recruiting, onboarding, and training replacement agents can cost up to $35,000 apiece, and that doesn’t include the unquantifiable but very real productivity benefits that experienced agents bring to the job each day.
The stress takes a toll on agents, but it’s impossible to know which ones will burn out and quit. A supervisor might notice an increase in tardiness or absence requests by one agent or another, but when teams consist of dozens or even hundreds of agents, it’s not enough to make a difference. And when burned-out or unhappy agents reduce their efforts and do just enough to stay on the payroll—a practice known as quiet quitting—supervisors are no more likely to see that as a prelude to actual quitting.
Signs of agent burnout are invisible to busy supervisors, and the problem may be worse now that so many agents work remotely. But reliable and quantifiable indicators of burnout do exist, buried in the mass of data collected by multiple contact center systems each day. Up to now there’s never been a way to identify and quantify those signs. But today, Intradiem’s Agent Burnout Indicator harnesses the predictive power of AI to leverage all that data to identify agents at risk of burnout, and provide contact center leaders with effective options to pull back their agents from the brink of attrition.
Leveraging Automation to Deliver Better Agent Support
The Agent Burnout Indicator tool collects data continuously from contact center process and agent performance indicators, comparing current employees’ data with data from past employees who had quit. The tool monitors key metrics on agents states (time spent engaging directly with customers, time spent on hold, or time spent in after-call work) as well as call handle time and occupancy trends (e.g., moving averages over a period of days or weeks) to build a snapshot of each individual agent’s situation.
Each agent is assigned to a risk category (low, moderate, high, or critical), and those assessments are updated daily, based on constantly refreshed data indicators. Supervisors can access the information at a glance in an intuitive and highly visual dashboard. The Agent Burnout Indicator recommends support actions that correspond to the particular needs of agents, ranging from one-to-one conversations to additional training, coaching, wellness breaks, or other actions which can be automatically scheduled or delivered through Intradiem. Agents at critical risk may receive more direct support and intervention, such as a change in schedule, work queue, or skills specialization.
Intradiem works with customers to determine which actions should be manual or automated, depending on their circumstances. Supervisors can investigate attrition risk at various levels of granularity—from individual agents to managers, groups, or business units—so they can quickly assess if specific teams or managers are associated with higher attrition rates.
This unique capability to leverage data to gauge the states of mind of hundreds or even thousands of agents is proving its value, as Intradiem customer feedback shows that supervisors love this tool. Customer service performance has taken on increasing significance in the efforts of large organizations to maintain a positive brand reputation. Customer-facing agents are on the front lines, and keeping them engaged, satisfied, and productive must be a priority for all businesses. Intradiem’s Agent Burnout Indicator solution is an effective new automation tool to help businesses remain aware of and responsive to the needs of their contact center agents.
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