Case Study: WFM Lowered Agent Turnover Rate by 33%, Saving Millions for a Leading BPO

One of ApexCX’s predecessors, Taylor Reach Group (“TRG”), by uncovering key causes for employee turnover rate, identified opportunities for a 33% reduction in attrition and saved millions for leading BPO.

The Client:

One of the largest privately-held outsourcing provider of contact center management and collection agency services in North America, offering a comprehensive set of business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions.  With locations throughout the United States, offshore, and near shore. The company offered turnkey solutions, encompassing contact center deployment, operations, staffing, and management services.

The Challenge:

With unemployment rates at a record low across the United States and competitors increasing their onshore presence, the client’s front-line representative turnover rate had increased to over 150%, and reaching as high as 200% in at least one of their domestic locations.

The Process:

Challenges such as attrition and staff retention do not exist in a vacuum. (To download a white paper on this subject, click here.) Understanding the interaction of the ‘thousand moving parts’ in any contact center and their impact on retentions required an holistic approach. Employing a Best-Practice Benchmark Assessment, we compared the center to best-practice centers highlighting key areas of successes and opportunities.

In addition to the benchmarking assessment, focus groups were held at five sites in four states across the U.S. with over 200 front-line staff. These sessions included agents, supervisors, workforce management, quality assurance, recruiting and training staff. Interviews were held with mid-level management, external department stakeholders, investors and the executive team.

A thorough evaluation of communication processes, data management and operational practices was completed, with over 200 unique documents reviewed and relevant data aggregated.

The Solution:

Our team presented a report and action plan that would

• Strengthen the recruitment process by interviewing for soft skills and adding a customized personality assessment to drive social connectedness, and workplace continuity.
• Create new training system to ensure consistency and effectiveness across sites and programs.
• Increase wages to competitive levels in each hiring market, and implement comprehensive compensation structure, with competitive wages, and bands/ranges for each role based on position profiles.
• Document and enforce company policies to ensure bias-free, fair and equitable practices.
• Update the organizations’ “ethos” to align with the goal to be the “best in the industry”.

The Result:

We uncovered 5 key areas within the client’s operations driving employee dissatisfaction resulting in high employee turnover in the first 90 days of employment.  and identified millions in cost savings by making changes to recruitment and training processes and practices. Specifically, we

• Pinpointed a 33% reduction in attrition through the recommendations.
• Provided a benchmark of practices compared to thousands of contact centers worldwide.
• Identified approximately $70 million in attrition costs that could be better spent in improving wages, retention incentives, personnel development, and facilities maintenance.
• Provided a comprehensive strategy to reduce turnover in the contact centers within 6-8 months and return to sub 100% attrition rates.