Why Data Is The Key To Surviving Customer Service’s Great Resignation

CTO and Founder at CallMiner. Responsible for strategic direction across business development, research and artificial intelligence.

By now, many of us have read the headlines around the “Great Resignation” or have seen it play out firsthand. The rate at which Americans at every level are looking for new jobs — or are quitting without another job lined up — is only expected to continue. A recent survey estimated that 55% of the workforce is on the lookout for a new gig as 2021 draws to a close. If you’re an executive, that statistic should concern you. On average, training and onboarding a new employee costs as much as six to nine months of their salary.

In high-churn positions like customer service, the mass exodus trend is even more troubling. Labor shortages have made it harder to recruit new talent. Managers are also stretched thinner than ever and are tasked with growing talent and giving regular performance feedback in remote or hybrid environments, often without the data they need to objectively drive these conversations in the first place.

The “Why” Behind The Great Resignation

If we push back the curtain on why people are quitting their jobs right now, there’s often one common thread: a lack of employee engagement. According to the results of a Gallup analysis, disengagement can cost a company of 10,000 people an average of $60.3 million a year.

Poor employee engagement isn’t just about boredom either. It’s deeper than that. The same Gallup study found that employees’ top three reasons for this disengagement were “not seeing opportunities for development,” “not feeling connected to the company’s purpose” and “not having strong relationships at work.”

You may look at these reasons and think that the onus is on the manager to help employees feel engaged. And you’d be right. But let’s look at an example of a manager in a contact or customer service center. These managers are often in charge of dozens of agents, meaning they have to distill a huge amount of information, pinpoint tangible areas of employee improvement and then help employees address their shortcomings or lean into areas of strength. That’s hard — if not impossible — without a way to separate the signal from the noise.

Consider that within the typical mid-sized company, there may be 300 contact center agents. The average agent may talk to customers approximately 40 times a day. That adds up to a staggering 12,000 calls per day. These calls may be recorded in the form of text transcriptions or audio files, and managers are often forced to review these interactions manually to pull out constructive insights on how an agent can improve.

What about the managers who don’t get access to those transcripts or audio calls? Their only insight into agent performance comes from post-interaction customer surveys, which are often skewed to how customers feel about a brand generally or don’t properly portray how the call actually went. Agents who receive good scores from customer surveys could go on for long periods of time without hearing from a manager. And for the agents who don’t, many aren’t getting the right feedback to actually help them improve. Between those two goalposts lies a whole lot of nuance and subjectivity.

This is why — often at no fault to the manager — customer service employees feel frustrated about career growth, promotions and other opportunities for development. Worse, in a fully remote or hybrid world, these employees may start to feel isolated or completely disconnected from the company’s mission or purpose. It’s important for employees to know, whether they’re agents in the contact center or in another department, not only how they’re being scored, but also to be celebrated for their successes and understand how they can improve their skills.

Turning The Tide On The Great Resignation

Many organizations talk about building a culture of continuous improvement, but without the right blend of data and supervisor-to-direct-report engagement, this type of culture is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The right data can come from a lot of places, so let’s consider the data from the customer conversations mentioned above. Using the right tools, like AI and analytics, a manager could better understand in aggregate how an agent is performing, including areas where they need to improve. For example, AI can identify patterns like silence or heightened emotion on a customer call and help a manager understand trends in how an agent reacts to these tense situations. In an ideal world, with the right tools, managers could support their agents through these tense situations while they’re happening.

These types of insights empower managers to understand individual strengths and weaknesses and objectively focus on those areas for improvement with personalized coaching. In addition, they can pinpoint areas of excellence and share best practices with their remote team to help others improve and boost confidence for high-performers. In this case, AI is used in the service of good, hands-on management, not as a tool to make the employee experience even less personal.

Data and technology alone won’t solve the problems central to the Great Resignation, but they’re key elements in helping managers be more informed and in touch with their employees. They can ensure that employees stay engaged by spurring the career growth, purpose and relationships they crave. By creating a more informed, data-driven culture, it’s easier to foster connections, make critical business improvements and create the modern workplaces today’s employees demand.