1st October Consulting

Case Study 1: Insurance Call Centre - High Turnover of Staff

This insurance call centre had extremely high staff attrition rates and a large number of recruits were leaving the organisation during the six-week induction programme - before they had even spoken to a customer on the 'phone!

This was putting pressure on the remaining staff and creating additional overtime spend, as well as having an impact on call answer rates. The challenge was to drastically reduce turnover amongst new recruits.

Initially, we reviewed the recruitment process and met with the Team Leaders and departmental managers who were conducting the recruitment interviews. We then looked at the format of the induction training programme including the quality of materials, the structure and content, and the delivery style. We also looked at the various documents such as the application form, marketing literature and the interview questions.

From this research and drawing on previous experience, it became clear that the recruitment process was over promising an interesting career in the call centre without fully explaining the more mundane aspects of the role - targets for the number of calls taken and value of policies sold, call recording and telephony statistics and the monotony of asking similar questions to each and every caller.

A more appropriate interview structure was devised including additional stages to the process and Team Leaders were coached in how to carry out recruitment interviews more effectively. The induction programme was amended to a modular format and testing of candidates was introduced to assess the candidates and check their understanding of the subjects.

Due to these and other changes, the process became more efficient, turnover was cut by more than half and the induction programme was reduced from six to four weeks, so new starters were 'on the floor' taking calls from customers more quickly.

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