How to prevent customer service employee turnover?
Suppose a customer service specialist earns 5,000 $ in your company. If he decides to quit after 3 months, you will lose about 40,000. It will include not only the cost of salary, but also the recruitment costs, training and salary of employees involved in his/her onboarding.
Finance is one thing. The other side of the coin is the image of your company, which certainly suffers from turnover. We can also add to this low employee morale, project downtime or the need to organize further recruitments.
Since you are reading this article, you are probably aware of all of this. So how to effectively prevent turnover in customer service departments?
Customer service today
Working in the modern customer service department does not resemble idyll and pleasant, casual conversations with customers interrupted by moments of forgetfulness in the company of delicious coffee. It is often associated with stress, pressure or the need to deal with demanding clients.
Of course, it also has many bright sides – but they are not the cause of turnover in your company.
Our observations show that consultants quit their jobs for three main reasons:
- There is often chaos in customer service departments. There is no clear division of duties and tasks are assigned randomly.
- Working in the customer service department is boring. Most of the time, consultants answer questions that arise daily or several times a week.
- Employees have every minute of their working day filled. They don’t have time to develop or come up with creative solutions to clients’ problems.
We intentionally do not mention financial issues or benefits – the necessity and the way of eliminating the related problems is rather obvious.
Automation and rotation
An effective solution to your problems may be the implementation of automation based on machine learning. Its role is to provide clients with the highest level of service while relieving consultants.
This happens because:
- Consultants stop replying to repetitive messages. Instead, artificial intelligence does it.
- They do not have to waste time sending requests to customers to attach the necessary documents. The algorithm is also great at doing this.
- They will respond to messages faster – thanks to automatic suggestions created by their virtual assistant.
- A system will be created, thanks to which messages will be automatically assigned to most competent employees.
Thanks to all these solutions, the quality of consultants’ work is improved, as well as their satisfaction. They gain a completely new role in the company, which allows them to focus 100% on customer problems, not just responding to their requests. They have time to analyze specific cases, develop the best, often innovative solutions, train or improve their competences.
As a result, of course, the turnover decreases.
Summary
Automation is not only a solution to the problem of employee turnover. Its implementation is also a response to the needs of modern customers, whose requirements are growing every year.
They are well aware of the technological possibilities, therefore they expect, among others, 24/7 customer service or immediate responses. At the same time, they want personalized solutions – a chatbot informing that a consultant will be available the next day at 8 a.m. won’t do any good.
Providing them with such a level of service without the use of artificial intelligence would place great pressure on consultants and would result in a constant increase in the level of employment. This way, you will lose money and will not unleash the potential of your team. Fortunately, there are other options.
Find out more about the AIBusters solution!