Reduce Turnover and Improve Recruitment with Schedule-Change Empowerment

With Millennials making up the majority (70%!) of the US contact center agent workforce, and with Millennials’ demand for a balance between their work and personal lives, contact centers find themselves facing increased turnover just as offshoring is decreasing, and US contact centers are growing again. The challenge is to find a means of retaining the existing agent workforce and recruiting new agents when turnover occurs.
The results of the SWPP-enabled WorkFlex survey available in this newsletter indicate that a third of currently employed agents would be willing to accept lower wages in return for schedule-change empowerment and the same percentage of potential hires would take a lower starting wage if it were included as a benefit. This demonstrates the importance to the contact center workforce of schedule-change flexibility and makes the case for deploying technology that enables self-directed schedule-change capability permitting agents to:

  • View their schedule anywhere/anytime
  • Pre-define interest periods for extra hours and time off
  • Receive alerts for schedule-change opportunities of interest
  • Submit any number of schedule requests with no advanced notice
  • Receive automated approval notification with minimal or no delay
  • Take time off or add time to current schedule
  • Take time off and make it up at another time
  • Trade schedules with another agent
  • Change work-activity (e.g., from voice to chat, email, training)

WorkFlex not only provides these capabilities, but automates all change processes, leaving workforce administrators free to manage other priorities, and ensuring that contact center staffing is optimized. Turnover reduction and recruitment improvement are readily achievable in the 2017. For more information, visit our website at www.workflexsolutions.com.

“I see WorkFlex as the way things should rightly be for the call center workforce. Agents should be empowered with scheduling flexibility, as long as it does not hurt the business. WorkFlex does exactly that. Agents can see in advance what schedule changes are and are not allowed. This adds real tangible value for the agents as they make their own decisions on pay and tenure.”

—Tim Galarza, Global WFM and Partner Management at Lyft