5th Talent International interviews contact center leaders from 76 companies from July 2021 to June 2022 to understand the state of the industry.  Many companies have lower employee turnover and better performance than before the pandemic.  What separates them from most companies is their proactive leadership to improve the employee experience, develop frontline leadership, and offer employees the flexibility they want.

In 2021, leaders will need to seize the opportunity to build a sustainable work-at-home model.  Based on recent interviews with over 40 contact center executives, the honeymoon is over. Most leaders indicated their workforces are experiencing fatigue, and they are noticing declining engagement, deteriorating performance and rising attrition. It appears that when companies overcome the inherent challenges of the work-at-home model, they reduce fatigue, improve performance, increase employee satisfaction and decrease attrition.

The contact center industry has never experienced anything like the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It has led to a rapid and global shift of moving contact center agents and supervisors to a work at home model.  We launched this research to help industry leaders determine what to do when agents are permitted to return to the center.  We asked three important questions during this study.

Many organizations are dealing with work-at-home (WAH) realities for the first time. Others have expanded WAH for their contact center agents, many of whom have not been in the WAH environment before. This shift is creating new challenges for service operations. Join us for a complimentary webinar where we will discuss best practices to maximize the chances of success in this new world for your organizations, your employees, and your customers.

5th Talent are frequent guests for this podcast series.  With challenges related to employee retention and engagement impacting companies in every industry, we're launching a new podcast during which our J.D. Power customer service experts and guests will discuss the latest employee engagement trends and what companies that are winning the battle for talent are doing right. 

Peter Ryan Interviews the Co-Founders of 5th Talent, Ted Nardin & Brian Kearney regrading the challenges and opportunities of the work at home model.  Work at home is going to continue because employees do not want to return to the center and can now get work at home jobs very easily with other companies. Leaders need to address this changing landscape or they may face disengagement, turnover, low productivity and poor customer satisfaction.

 The past four months have been surreal for customer experience professionals, with confusion and upheaval looming large for outsourcers.  It is in this vein that upstart consultancy 5th Talent recently published a study on trends in work-at-home agent management. Broadly speaking, the research points to a preference among front-line employees for more flexibility when it comes to virtual working.  But 5th Talent’s study also points to both limitations in this regard, as well as key pain points with outsourcers. 

Successful organizations know what their customers expect from the service they provide by channel. So what do customers expect in 2020?  Join us for a complimentary one-hour webcast to learn what is driving the customer experience across service channels. 
 

5th Talent International share their perspective on how to prevent employee turnover and thrive in the future of work.  With what the media has dubbed “The Great Resignation” putting a strain on businesses across the globe, organizations are challenged with finding ways to address and reduce attrition. Check out this on-demand webinar during which our customer service and employee experience experts.

5th Talent International recently interviewed 41 contact center leaders regarding their shirt to a work at home model for their employees.  These leaders represented more than 40,000 agents and supervisors across 11 different countries and 9 major industries.  They share the issues they are having with the work at home model and best practices for overcoming them.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a rapid and global shift of moving contact center agents and supervisors to a work-at-home model, giving rise to two central questions: How has this impacted performance; and is the traditional work-at-home model sustainable?  Common industry wisdom favors a 100% work-at-home model as the best chance for sustainability, and that most of the agents who performed well in the center will not transition successfully to working at home. 

5th Talent International, LLC is a service consulting company that helps organizations develop a meaningful work environment.  When people have meaningful work it significantly lowers turnover and increases customer satisfaction.  However, promoting meaningful work is not enough because there are opposing forces that we call “grind” which is destroying the meaning people find in their job.  Our methodology enables companies to reduce grind and increase the meaning their people find in their actual work.

5th Talent International has published its third work at home study since the beginning of the pandemic. This April 2021 report outlines what we call the "Work at Home Dilemma." There are challenges to the sustainability of the work at home model, but employees do not want to return to the center full-time. Although deciding on where people work has an impact, the real solution to the dilemma is for supervisors to bridge the newly created "Physical Gap" between them and their agents.

On the latest episode of our Work-at-Home podcast, Ted Nardin and Brian Kearney from 5th Talent join J.D. Power’s Michael Vermillion and Mark Miller to discuss issues and trends related to the shift to Work-at-Home for customer service operations. 

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Topics discussed during this podcast include:​

• Meaningful Work: the “magic metric”

• Key findings from Work-At-Home study

• Work-At-Home fatigue

• Recommendations for isolating and addressing frustrations

Brian Kearney and Ted Nardin are the co-founders of 5th Talent tell us what agents and supervisors they really think about working from home?  Their mission is to make work more meaningful, so they asked thousands of contact center workers  about their recent working from home.
 

While the trend for the control group remained virtually unchanged, the
centers that received the program noticed significant improvements.
After the program was implemented overall turnover dropped by 25%.
In addition, first contact resolution (FCR) increased 3% while customer
satisfaction (CSAT) improved approximately 10%. The targeted sites
reached the highest CSAT scores the company had ever achieved.