By
Oded Karev
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Date Published: February 18, 2019 - Last Updated 4 Years, 3 Days, 14 Hours, 11 Minutes ago
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Comments
Contact center attrition rates continue to be a top concern for managers,
and for a good reason. According to the
2016 U.S. Contact Decision Makers’ Guide, the average annual turnover rate for agents in U.S. contact centers is 29
percent, with an average lifespan of just 3.3 years. For contact centers,
this creates a high volume of employees who need to be onboarded and
offboarded on any given day. To further this problem, onboarding and
offboarding processes have traditionally been complex and time-consuming.
With increased customer demands putting even more pressure on agents,
contact centers must find a way to effectively onboard and offboard
employees to ensure consistent customer touchpoints. Not only will this
improve the customer experience, but if an employee is onboarded with the
right training and a core understanding of business processes, it will
increase job retention and satisfaction – the ultimate goal for contact
centers.

Organizations like The Results Companies,
which provide customer support in 28 contact centers worldwide, is taking
steps to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning
technologies to support employee onboarding and offboarding. The company
oversees more than 22000, agents, and handles over 100 million interactions
annually servicing their partners in new sales, care, retention and win
back. With new technology processes in place, onboarding/offboarding
processes that used to take the company an hour each time is now
accomplished within seconds with 100 percent data accuracy. For a large
global company like The Results Companies, the use of AI-enabled robotic
process automation (RPA) was a no brainer.
To streamline employee onboarding and
offboarding, it’s critical to review the three main buckets involved in
this process:
Understand the Power of Training
When it comes to onboarding, it’s important that employees are properly
trained so they can handle incoming requests in a timely and effective
manner. Those organizations who have a goal of lowering attrition rates
within its contact center will be one step closer if its agents feel
empowered with the right tools and information. In the past year, more
contact centers are leveraging AI and machine learning to add an
intelligent layer across different scenarios. For instance, certain
automation functions grant employees access to key actions and contextual
information in a single view during a customer call. Working with a smart,
automated system will largely reduce the amount of training time required
since AI is meant to make these systems more intuitive and interactive, and
allow employees to do much of the learning on the job.
Lighten the Burden on the Human Resources Department
Every new or departing employee needs to be documented in a contact
center’s HR system, in addition to a variety of HR tasks that need to be
completed in the onboarding and offboarding process. Whether it’s typing up
an offer letter to candidates, reviewing resumes, conducting background
checks, organizing benefits documents or transferring accounts to a new
owner. These tasks can be extremely tedious and put a strain on the HR
department from a bandwidth perspective, especially given the high call
center turnover rates. To help assist with this work, many HR departments
are integrating AI technology to automate manual tasks like producing offer
letter templates or scanning incoming applications for keywords.
Strengthen IT Security and Compliance
According to a
study
from security firm OneLogin, 20 percent of IT professionals said their
organization had experienced data breaches by ex-employees, and 48 percent
of professionals said they are aware that former employees still have
access to the corporate network. This is why it’s so crucial for IT
departments to cut off access to departing employees. Alternatively, new
employees must be correctly entered into the IT system and given relevant
access based on their job function. It’s also important for call centers to
make sure onboarding and offboarding processes align with compliance and
company protocols. Machine learning-based automation tools
can help by automatically deleting past employees from IT systems and
providing new (and existing) agents with compliance-related scripts. In
addition, RPA can help streamline the complex scope of GDPR by quickly and
accurately handling a high volume of operational processes that integrate
into enterprise applications. AI capabilities are able to detect privacy
data within unstructured data to ensure nothing is missed during the data
deletion process.
According to
Gartner, 15 percent of all customer service interactions will be handled entirely by AI by 2021. While contact centers might be hesitant to integrate
AI solutions, they need to embrace it in order to compete in the long-term.
The Results Companies is a great use case on how AI and machine learning
technologies will undoubtedly help with onboarding and offboarding
processes. AI can also be applied to all facets of the call center – from
improved customer service to reduced call times. This means increased
revenues for organizations and happier agents – a perfect combination for
call center success.