An Era of Great Onboarding

Employee turnover has always been one of the biggest obstacles to the call centre industry. Company missions, and visions all mean nothing if your organization can’t maintain consistency.

Unfortunately, the employee churn is contagious; and can signal to an otherwise healthy team that it’s time to jump ship.  One way to neutralize this threat is to treat onboarding not as a process that lasts 90 or 120 days, but rather as a continuous responsibility of the management.

We’ll get back to onboarding in a minute, but first let’s address the elephant in the call centre, and most other service industries as well: The Great Resignation. You’ve probably seen and felt the effects of it in restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, retail, and most B2C point-of-contact services.

The combination of COVID-19 transmission and public health fears along with an emphasis on the decision of many employees to simply demand more from their careers has fueled a mass exodus from the customer service industry.

While this may be bad news for struggling businesses, there is a silver lining for the organizations that are built on employee development and continuing education.

Whenever there’s offboarding, extra room on the ship opens. Recent studies suggest that at least half of the participants in The Great Resignation will be job hunting in 2022.

That means millions of new workers will enter our sector in the next few months, and the onboarding experience will be key in shaping how they perceive their new company and how long they intend to stay.

If your business is prioritizing career development through a continuous onboarding style, you’re ahead of the game.

An emphasis on engagement from day one demonstrates an investment in the future of your team and encourage them to stay with your organization longer. Are you poised to thrive in an era of great onboarding?

With a wide demographic range of potential workers, most are only slightly experienced with the shift to remote work or hybrid formatting. While they may be looking for more flexibility, they will require guidance and structure with regard to when and how they work.

Fortunately, if you’ve been paying attention to the call centre industry trends over the last two years, a hybrid setting now permits multiple staffing options and opens opportunities for untapped segments of the population with physical disabilities, childcare issues or poor commuting options.

With more part-time workers, contact centres also have a more agile workforce that can ramp up and down quickly, matching contact centre staffing to call volumes.

This success of your business and your new hires is now even more dependent upon excellent interaction management and workforce engagement management (WEM) software.

Your new hires will also look to senior staff for guidance and cues. The same senior staff and agents that adapt and adopt new concepts and applications will become the key to creating a successful and rewarding experience for new hires.

Those agents and employees that embody your vision for the organization will also encourage and attract employees looking for a fresh start, allowing organizations to select the brightest and best as they build for the future.