Retain Talent With Strong Contact Centre EX

Steve Nattress at Enghouse Interactive takes a look at agent welfare in the contact centre and outlines a practical EX strategy to maximize agent welfare and improve business outcomes in your contact center.

Understanding the Benefits of Improving the Agent Experience

Skilled, understanding agents are at the heart of delivering an excellent customer experience. But the competition for good staff is tough, while agent burnout is a growing risk.

All of this means engaging and retaining your people is vital. Customer service leaders must focus on the contact center employee experience (EX) they provide to reduce attrition, optimize performance, and lower costs.

Why Agent Experience Is No Longer Optional

Contact centers have traditionally struggled to recruit and retain agents for the long-term. And the picture is getting worse. ContactBabel research points to a 23% average attrition rate in the UK, and 30% and over in large US operations.

That’s a quarter or more of your workforce leaving every year – and anecdotally it can be much higher.

McKinsey estimates it costs between $10-20,000 to hire a new agent when recruitment, training and lost productivity are all added together.

But equally importantly attrition impacts the experience offered to customers as new starters get up to speed, while increasing the pressure on remaining staff as experienced talent walks out the door.

You face mounting pressure to:

• Attract and retain frontline talent, particularly as interactions become more complex
• Support remote and hybrid flexibility
• Prevent burnout and mental fatigue
• Improve performance without over-monitoring

Simply stocking the breakroom with snacks or celebrating milestones such as birthdays is not enough. Instead it means giving agents the right tools, flexibility, and support to thrive. This makes EX a core component of business resilience and overall performance, rather than just an afterthought.

“When our agents feel supported and equipped, they deliver more empathetic, consistent service. And that’s because with the right support from us and from their tools, they’re not just surviving their day anymore, they’re actually succeeding at their job!” Contact Center Leader

The Engagement Gap in Contact Centers

Many existing contact center workforce management strategies are simply not set up to meet the needs of increasingly demanding (and scarce) talent.

They don’t provide the tools for flexible and remote working, don’t give visibility into agent performance, and fail to systematically address issues such as stress and burnout.

Over three-quarters (77%) of agents say their workloads are now more complex and 56% say they’ve experienced burnout, according to Salesforce research.

Add in that hybrid and remote working mean that agents now have greater flexibility about where they can work and the pressure to bridge the engagement gap is rising dramatically.

You can’t fix agent burnout and talent shortages with pizza and praise. It requires operational design that prioritizes human needs and data-driven action.

Most current workforce management (WFM) and workforce engagement management (WEM) tools focus on maximizing productivity, rather than focusing on EX. Only 38% of contact centers surveyed by ICMI . say they measure agent satisfaction and wellbeing, alongside traditional metrics such as time utilization and availability.

To be successful, contact centers need to change their approach, as we’ll explain in the next chapter.

Rethinking EX as a Strategic Lever

Contact centers have to shift from workforce management to workforce empowerment. EX is central to improving performance, increasing retention, and differentiating in a competitive market.

McKinsey found that engaged and satisfied call-center employees are not only 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year, but also 3.3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues.

All of this demonstrates that EX is now a strategic differentiator—not just for talent retention, but for brand consistency, compliance, and customer satisfaction.

It lowers absenteeism, reduces burnout, improves CX and boosts productivity, delivering long-term strategic ROI that goes far beyond savings on recruitment costs.

Achieving this shift to workforce empowerment means:

• Giving agents more control and visibility over their schedules
• Designing digital tools that reduce friction and make processes seamless
• Measuring wellbeing and performance side-by-side
• Supporting hybrid and remote agents with equal resources
• Using Voice of the Employee (VoE) feedback loops to shape policies, not just track sentiment

Tools That Actually Improve Agent Experience

Implementing a successful contact center employee experience strategy requires a combination of an open, listening culture, people-centric processes, and the right technology. All three of these pillars need to be in place.

When it comes to operationalizing EX strategy, focusing on these seven areas is vital:

1. Flexible WEM and Self-Scheduling

Like many employees, across all industries, contact center agents crave flexibility over where and when they work.

Empowering them with flexible WEM tools that allow them to book and trade shifts to meet their needs therefore reduces absenteeism and boosts satisfaction. Yet the majority still can’t self-select their own schedules, according to research in Contact.centres.com.

Additionally, WEM can be used to support agents and their mental wellbeing, such as by mandating more frequent breaks for those that would benefit from them.

2. Enable Remote Agents and Integrate with the Gig-Economy

Remote working provides access to a much wider pool of talent, particularly when it comes to scarce skills such as languages.

To benefit, contact centers need to offer the same working experience wherever people are based through cloud-native CCaaS platforms that onboard and support them quickly.

They can also tap into the gig-economy or those looking for shorter shifts, such as students or those working just during school hours. This delivers flexibility for all as agents can simply log on and work when required without needing to travel to an office.

3. Deploy Wellbeing Dashboards and EX Metrics

Traditional management dashboards track performance metrics including average handle times or interactions answered per shift, with some also considering customer satisfaction-based metrics.

These need to be extended to cover EX metrics such as agent satisfaction. Overlaying both sets of metrics gives insight into agent wellbeing and its causes.

For example, agent engagement could drop dramatically if there is a spike in complex calls caused by a wider service failure. Analysis helps pinpoint areas for improvement and the early signs of burnout, enabling it to be addressed before it worsens.

4. Adopt Digital Ergonomics and UX-Centered Tools

Contact centers have grown over time, meaning agents have to access a wide range of systems to handle customer interactions.

Focus on the user experience for agents and eliminate pain points, such as through unified agent desktops that bring together all relevant information in a single screen. Use technology, especially AI, to assist agents, automatically providing relevant

information or automating mundane tasks such as call wrap-ups. This all lessens the cognitive load on agents, reducing pressure and allowing them to focus on the customer.

Deploying technology within the onboarding process also helps drive engagement and early productivity. Analyze skills and training progress so you can focus agents on interactions in specific areas, getting them up to speed and active faster.

5. Voice of the Employee (VoE) Integration

Make employee feedback part of your core metrics. Use structured surveys, open feedback channels, and AI to analyze themes. Provide options to give feedback anonymously such as anonymous surveys or even a simple suggestions box in the office.

Whatever VoE methods are used it’s vital to demonstrate that you are listening and acting on feedback. Report back regularly on concerns raised and what has been done about them.

6. Gamify Your Processes

Many parts of the agent role can feel mundane and formulaic. Employing gamification helps transform the experience, building healthy competition for targets.

Bonuses for high achievers don’t solely have to be financial. Some contact centers offer a preferred parking space or more quirky incentives, such as the chance for the boss to wash the winner’s car.

7. Provide Clear Guidance for Personal Growth

Agents want to feel their role is developing and that they can access relevant training in order to grow and build their careers.

Using AI-based quality management to analyze 100% of interactions gives supervisors a far better view of their team’s engagement than random sampling.

This enables them to support staff more knowledgably and authoritatively, pinpointing specific training needs, and improving performance and engagement.

At the same time adding training as tasks within WFM systems, planned for times of lower demand, helps agents to grow their skills in a seamless way.

Finally, contact centers need to showcase future career opportunities for agents. This isn’t just about promotion to supervisor – there are a wide range of skills needed in customer service, from quality management to compliance and technology.

In fact, it’s common for contact centers to lose staff to the wider organization beyond the contact center, thanks to the excellent grounding they’ve received. Demonstrating potential career paths motivates agents and also helps retain them and their experience for the longer term.

Designing for EX-First Operations

Focusing your contact center on agents and their needs goes beyond technology and tools. Following these best practices enables you to reframe your strategy and actions, embedding EX at the core of your organization.

1. Shift EX from a Cultural to a Performance Tool

Keeping your agents happy isn’t just a cultural nice to have. Happier agents feed directly into more resilient and more productive teams who deliver an improved service to your customers. By championing the importance of EX, you’ll drive better business and financial outcomes for your organization.

2. Use CCaaS to Level the Playing Field

Unify the experience and ensure it is high quality for all your agents, whether they are office-based, remote, gig or part-time.

By deploying a CCaaS platform to underpin your operations, everyone gets equal access to the tools, training, coaching, and feedback they need. The result? Engaged, productive staff, seamless, cost-effective technology and superior CX.

3. Embed EX into Your Metrics

Solely tracking metrics such as efficiency gives you only a partial view of performance. Expand your monitoring to measure well-being, engagement, and enablement too, and ensure that your WEM and QA tools are aligned with these metrics.

Treat EX as a key performance metric. By acting on the results you can catch the symptoms of burnout and attrition before they develop, taking effective action to engage and retain staff.

4. Involve Agents in Solution Design

Listen and act on agent feedback. Ask them how your systems impact their work and identify the areas that cause friction and dissatisfaction.

It’s likely they don’t only annoy agents, but impact their productivity too. Build around this Voice of the Employee input and use it to drive continual improvements in the tools and environment you provide.

Making the Shift from Agent Management to Empowerment: A Checklist

Improving agent Employee Experience can seem daunting, but following this phased approach helps you move forward effectively:

1. Audit your current systems to see where they are over-rigid and cause friction that undermines EX
2. Deploy VoE mechanisms and tools to collect feedback
3. Work with agents to map pain points and blockers to their daily work
4. Roll out new capabilities to overcome issues, initially piloting them with small groups of agents before scaling
5. Track potential performance improvements through workforce analytics that cover both human and operational outcomes. Finetune as necessary and then move onto the next EX priority

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Enghouse Interactive – View the Original Article

For more information about Enghouse Interactive - visit the Enghouse Interactive Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Enghouse Interactive
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson