When it comes to improving call center performance, bank executives often look for a technological fix rather than a cheaper—and more effective—focus on employee hiring and training practices, says Erika van Noort, director, management consulting, with Montreal-based BCE Elix.

“Organizations are constantly saying that retaining people is their number one challenge,” van Noort said during a Monday session at BAI’s SmartTactics conference in Las Vegas. “Yet whenever they go to invest money, they tend to invest in processes and technology rather than people.”

In a talk entitled “Employee Retention Strategies in Call Centers,” van Noort said the job tenure of a call center employee is often less than 18 months because of attrition. To keep qualified people on the job longer, banks need to change their hiring, onboarding and training processes, she said.

“A lot of these fixes would be low cost,” she added. “It’s focusing more on how you do things than the technology that enables you to do things.”

First, van Noort said, bankers need to analyze whether their call center attrition is positive or negative. Positive attrition is when employees move on to other positions in the company; negative attrition is when they leave the company.

Although call center work is difficult, van Noort noted, it exposes employees to more products and services than anywhere else in the company. “They tend to become high value employees very quickly.”

If the attrition is negative, van Noort recommended the following measures:

1. Understand the market you’re recruiting from. Some areas are overcrowded with call centers, which makes good hires difficult to find.
2. Use onboarding to connect with new hires. Van Noort said new hires should be provided with information about the company and made to feel welcome when they first arrive on the premises.
3. Manage employee expectations in the hiring process. “A lot of organizations don’t articulate what life in the call center is really like,” van Noort said. She recommended that new hires spend time with employees on the floor during the training process.
4. Take training seriously. Van Noort says some banks will suspend training classes when the call queue gets too crowded. “Best-in-class centers never suspend training unless the building is on fire,” she said.
5. Articulate a career path for those employees who wish to advance within the organization.
6. Start small. Van Noort advised making changes with one group of hires and measuring their progress as a control group before making changes across the organization.

For more information about call center issues, see “Leveraging Technology for Improved Call Center Productivity” in the March/April 2006 issue of BAI Banking Strategies.

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