Cures for the Most Common Call Center Problems

Call centers are the lifeblood of customer service behind the biggest brands in the world – ones that we as consumers interact with daily for help with our technology, our bank accounts, a hotel reservation, you name it! The call centers behind the biggest brands are fundamental to operations, and yet chronically suffer from operating problems. Some of these challenges relate to staff and others to technology. 

The thing is, if nobody talks about problems they will never get fixed. Thankfully the industry has done a thorough job of covering the different problems that call centers experience, and we have graciously compiled all of that information into one central list of call center problems, PLUS manageable solutions to address them. Here in alphabetical order is the ultimate list of common call center problems and how to solve them.

Absenteeism

Globally the absentee rate in call centers is around 11%, Ameyo reported. Stress and a sense of low morale cause absenteeism, says Invoca. They explain that the side effects caused by prolonged stress such as sickness and burnout, may not be associated with the root cause at first. 

C-Zentrix explains how the problem becomes cyclical. Absenteeism creates an additional workload for employees who come to work, perpetuating an even more stressful environment that affects the service they can provide. Over time this pattern leads to low employee morale.

Repeated absenteeism has an impact on productivity overall, which creates additional problems for the call center. To combat the absenteeism problem, call centers have been allowing agents and other staff to work from home, says ListenTrust. Other solutions include policies around absenteeism with trackable metrics shared with employees to improve accountability.

Adapting to Multi-Channel Communication

Customer service has evolved to include various communication channels from phone calls to emails, social media, and chat. Call centers must keep up with changing trends and adopt the necessary technological infrastructure to support multi-channel communication. As they do, the job of the agent can become increasingly complex. Flatworld Solutions shares that the availability of different communication mediums “creates problems as it leaves call center agents puzzled which channel to focus on.” To help agents adapt to the various technologies available, Zendesk recommends choosing software that’s intuitive, easy to use and requires little training. Additionally, they say call centers can address this problem by implementing a shadowing program between senior and junior agents, and offering clear technical onboarding on each technology until agents feel confident using them.

Agent Attrition

Agent attrition is high as a result of “long hours and demanding targets,” says Call Hippo. When workers quit it impacts other employees still on the job from additional duties to lower morale. For the operations side, it means more hiring and training of new talent, which adds up and leads to additional expenses for the call center. It can cost between six and nine months salary to replace an agent, says Simply Contact.

To help slow attrition, Playvox recommends the following strategies:

• Reward and recognize agents with outstanding performance
• Offer employees competitive compensation and benefits
• Make sure agents have adequate and ongoing training to feel confident and motivated
• Gamification of employee achievements at work

Indeed agents need to feel valued and like their part of an organization that wants to engage them. Our own HiringBranch research found that the use of a skills-based hiring assessment was an effective tool to combat attrition. From a pool of 5000 candidates hired using a skills-based hiring assessment, there were top and bottom-skilled employees hired. “For every 1 top-skilled customer service employee hired, 27.3 bottom-skilled employees attrited. For every 1 top-skilled sales employee hired, 9.8 of the bottom-skilled employees attrited.” That means that skilled employees will attrit less, and therefore if an organization can select candidates based on the presence of skills, they can curb attrition later on.

Agent Burnout

As many as 59% of call center agents are at risk of burnout according to Toister Solutions.

The driving factor behind these alarming rates all documented call center problems in this article including stressful working conditions, angry customers, high call volumes and more. In other words, agent burnout is a symptom of other root problems faced by call centers.

When agents burn out they are more likely to attrit, which, as seen above, creates a new set of problems, and too often management doesn’t react to agent burnout until it’s too late, says Convoso. To stop this downward spiral, agents need to be educated on what burnout looks like, and that education should come from the company. It not only gives employees the tools to proactively prevent themselves from burning out, it also signals to employees that the company prioritizes their mental health, which can help with agent retention - but more on that to come. Gallup even suggests going a step further and giving managers the responsibility of recognizing when signs of burnout begin to appear on their team.

Angry Customers

When a product delivery is late, or there is a manufacturing defect, or an online system goes down, customers rightly get angry. The call center agents bear the brunt of the angry customers even though they have nothing to do with the problem, says this Australian Workers Union - that’s just part of the job. With the amount of calls actually rising as seen in another problem below, there is no shortage of angry customer calls. The ongoing barrage of negative interactions will wear down even the best and most empathetic employees says Invoca. They recommend checking in with employees regularly, maybe even between calls, to see how they’re doing. This gives employees a chance to offload some of that negative energy - a place to vent - and may also help to slow or prevent eventual burnout.

Agent Retention

Similar to agent attrition and turnover, agent retention differs slightly as a metric. HiBob explains “The retention rate measures the percentage of people who remain employed by a company over a specific period. This is essentially the opposite of attrition metrics, which measure the percentage of employees who leave the company.”

Randstad projections in Canada demonstrate the discrepancy between positions and agents available in the customer service sector. Contact centers have more positions than they do applicants. Now, there are even on-call CX gigs to help contact centers make up for their lack of staff.

To help boost retention rates with current employee resources, Just Call says call center managers can do the following:

• Understand employee concerns by talking with them
• Motivate employees and make them feel valued
• Provide the right tools and equipment to do the job
• Don’t micromanage employees

The same strategies to combat attrition are also helpful here.

Conflicting Priorities

Call centers are often trying to make operations as productive and profitable as possible, while also maintaining high CSAT scores, innovating on new technologies, and all this with rising call volumes and mounting problems. This perfect storm creates conflicting priorities for the call center itself - a notion that can get passed down to employees. Ring Central explains that different senior management roles may have different priorities for the call center from sales to issue resolution and even brand reputation. To avoid a confusing goal for agents which can lead to inconsistent service make sure that there is one overarching priority that agents know about and is socialized with employees often.

Customer Dissatisfaction

The problem of customer dissatisfaction is inherent to call centers given that those dedicated to CX functions are there to resolve customer complaints. Even in outbound calls, customers can feel dissatisfied with the experience. Invoca explains that inbound call center agents tend to deal with customer complaints and outbound agents typically make unsolicited calls, and therefore both are unwelcome experiences for the customer from the get go.

If the call center agent doesn’t handle the customer communication with care, the customer experience can worsen and the problem of dissatisfaction can increase, and even impact revenue. Scorebuddy articulates that when the level of expected customer service isn’t met repercussions can include:

• A decline in customer satisfaction
• Loss in customer retention
• Negative reviews
• Customer churn as they seek out competitors
• Loss in revenue
• Negative brand perception

Call centers know that customer satisfaction is important, so Zendesk explains that this is why they regularly track this metric.

Compliance Concerns

Call centers rely on different technology systems to respond to customer issues, log the resolution, process a transaction and so on. The presence of customer data throughout these systems makes them vulnerable to security breaches, and compliance is the key to avoiding this disastrous call center problem.

To protect from vulnerabilities, Nobelbiz says that internal compliance measures need to be established and followed like access control, data transfer, storage etc., and also that external compliance regulations need to be observed like GDPR, CCP, and other data protection laws. They say that call centers that use outdated CRMs could be vulnerable to a data breach for example.

CDC Software CEO, Matthew Bieber, advises call centers to enforce data encryption and security measures, provide data handling training to agents, and to regularly audit for compliance to applicable laws and regulations.

Dependence on Call Scripts

Agents who aren’t well trained or don’t have the right skills for the job can become dependent on call scripts. While these scripts can enhance a conversation when used sparingly, Software Suggest explains that if overused the agent risks sounding robotic and creating a tedious experience for the client.

To help agents Call Centre Helper recommends focusing on call quality rather than quantity, and training agents beyond the script with things like questions to ask, key phrases to use, listening tactics, and more. Agents also need to know that they have the freedom to go off-script!

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is the degree to which employees are engaged with the overall company goals and objectives, rather than just their next paycheck, says Novocall. They believe that organizations that want to effectively engage with their staff should create and live by cultural values. One survey from McKinsey found that promotion opportunities, the nature of the organization, and the community are among the most important factors to engage employees at work. C-zentrix further recommends making sure employees feel empowered, and automating tedious agent tasks.

Few Career Advancement Opportunities

As we saw in the call center problem above, few career advancement opportunities will lead to decreased employee engagement and even employee turnover, Get Voip explains. That makes sense given the simple fact that employees want to have the opportunity to advance their career regardless of the industry. 

Call Centre Helper provides solid advice on how to create career advancement opportunities for agents:

• Provide clear advancement opportunities with timelines
• Promote within, bringing agents up to hiring supervisors
• Create new roles 
• Have tiers for agents, with tier one being new and tier two being more experienced for example
• Provide training and upskilling opportunities even if they’re unrelated to the job at hand so agents can expand their capabilities and feel more satisfied at work

These are just a few ideas but they’re well within the grasp of any call center experiencing this challenge.

High Employee Turnover

Similar to attrition and retention, turnover refers to employees leaving the company. The key difference between employee turnover and attrition is this:

“Turnover covers employee departures that are either voluntary or involuntary, while attrition is used to describe departures that are voluntary or occur naturally, like retirement or the elimination of a job role.” - Academy of Innovation in HR

Employee turnover is rampant in call centers due to the high levels of stress (see next section), and other challenges mentioned in this article like rising call volumes of angry customers. Relative to other industries, the turnover rate in contact centers is the highest. Contact centers experience a 40% agent turnover rate on average, but some have reported as high as 100%!

The turnover rate is increasing over time says Evaluagent, who explains that this problem erodes the business leading to other issues like service quality due to the inconsistency of agents. This can lead to CSAT issues overtime, which as we saw above connects to a host of other call center problems.

To address employee turnover, see the solutions listed above in Few Career Advancement Opportunities, Employee Engagement, and Agent Retention.

High Levels of Stress

The stress of a call center agent is real. A recent interview with a call center manager on the HiringBranch blog explains what daily life is like for call center agents: 

“Agents now have to use ten different systems and need to support technical, sales, and customer service all at once. They need to have technical skills, people skills, and be able to navigate the processes to solve customer problems, all while the customer is on the line.”

Playvox adds to this the reality that agents often spend 9-10 hours a day in cramped cubicle environments speaking to frustrated customers, with low compensation.

To manage agent stress, Call Centre Helper shares helpful tips like giving employees wellness breaks, having managers in place to escalate issues to, and allowing agents to politely end the call if needed.

Inadequate Training

Agents often don’t receive enough training to do their job well. Training may be inadequate during the onboarding phase or throughout the employee’s time at the company, explains ROI Call Center Solutions. They explain that employees who don’t receive proper training will not necessarily give proper service, eventually leading to eroding customer experiences, a loss of customer retention, and so on.

Call Hippo suggests focusing on the effectiveness of the trainings provided. For example, get more creative in the training delivery and use multi-media, set up team learning opportunities, have brainstorming sessions, and do customer role play to ensure the agent is ready.

Inadequate Skill Measurement

Skills-based hiring has proven extremely effective in contact center environments where high-volume mandates are never-ending due to problems like attrition and turnover. Skills-based hiring is the approach to measuring soft and hard skills applicable to a specific role in a particular industry and then using those skills as leading decision-making criteria in a job hire. 

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The Boston Consulting Group revealed that skills-based hires were promoted more often than their degree-hired counterparts for customer service, sales, compliance, finance, and more. In fact, the role with the highest promotion rates within the skills-based hires was call center manager. If skills-based hires perform just as well as traditional hires, adopting this method could offer many benefits to contact centers with high-volume hiring needs. The problem is call centers don’t have a way to measure skills easily, which is easily solved with the HiringBranch skills assessment designed for contact centers and high-volume hiring scenarios.

Lack of Personalization

Customers like the feeling of personalized communications. In fact, Segment report that 69% of consumers like personalization as long as it's based on information they have shared with the business. Despite that figure, just 15% of customers feel like their typical brand experiences are personalized, says CDC Software.

This is one problem that is slightly more complex to solve as it requires a thoughtful approach. ICR Evolution explains that call centers should make a multi-step plan including the following:

• Effective consumer data collection on demographics, purchase history and preferences
• Data analysis that aims to identify patterns and trends
• Customer segmentation based on the data collected
• Staff training on how to apply personalization to their customer interactions
• Collecting customer feedback to measure effectiveness 

Sometimes a more personalized experience can arise just from having an agent with the right soft skills, like multitasking and empathy for example. Call centers that prioritize personalized customer interactions should consider the importance of measuring soft skills during the hiring process.

Lack of Time

As call centers experience rising call volumes and increasing employee turnover, the agents that are handling calls have less and less time to do so effectively, explains Software Suggest. As agents have less time, they become more stressed, and customers may feel less satisfied with the service provided. While staffing up is ideal to give agents more time to handle calls, that’s not always an option due to the related challenges listed in this article or even budget restrictions. To address the lack of time problem with existing staff resources, call centers can consider staffing up agents during peak times.

Long Wait Times

Waiting on the line to speak to an agent can cause customers who are already frustrated to feel worse. Long wait times are a classic problem for both call centers that have irritated their customers and the consumers who feel like their time is wasted. Time Doctor reports that 23% of customers feel they’re waiting too long.

Evaluagent recommends purchasing queue management software that will automatically route calls to the best department, which can reduce wait times. Invensis shares some additional solutions for call centers such as offering callback options to the customer, enhancing self-service options, and implementing intelligent queuing solutions that can distribute calls evenly.

Coming to a Close on Call Center Problems

The biggest takeaway from the ultimate list of call center problems listed above is that they’re deeply intertwined with one another. The problem of rising call volumes can increase agent stress, lead to less time to handle calls, erode customer satisfaction, contribute to employee turnover, and in turn a loss in call center revenue. This is just one example. While it takes discipline and perseverance, call centers have to address problems and challenges head-on to avoid each one spiraling out of control, and creating new problems.

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Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Myrium Zilles

Image 1: Via Boston Consulting Group