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What is an Acceptable Call Centre Staff Turnover Rate following Burnout
Chapter 7 of the Telephone Staff Burnout Workbook
Sometimes, even when you have tried everything in your armoury to resuscitate a burned-out telephone agent, they decide to leave anyway.
This is not a management failure and is an opportunity to bring new blood into the team.
But what level of staff turnover due to burnout is acceptable?
The first thing that springs to mind is to consider whether that agent had covered his or her costs or brought in a profit.
However, this may not be the correct approach.
In our company, we have identified that if a telemarketer leaves during the first period of burnout, we lose money on our investment.
If they leave during the second period, they will have generated a small profit.
And by the third period, we're often quite keen to see them go!
That's because, in a small organisation, we are unlikely to have anywhere else for them to go - they have exhausted our own employee value chain.
We believe it is more meaningful for call centre managers to target themselves on an acceptable turnover level.
To set some expectations on this, our observations suggest that a typical pattern of staff loss would be a burnout related turnover of 17% a year in cold selling operations and 8% in relationship building operations.
However, before a manager can realistically target him or herself on containing burnout, he or she must spend some time identifiying their own organisation's specific burnout curve.
Bear in mind also that, if you implement an employee value chain, you will need to lose some of your burnt out telephone staff to make way for your upcoming stars.
The upside of the industry's high levels of staff turnover is that there is usually somewhere for agents to go within the employee value chain.
