Customer Service Skills Training And Roi


Statistics consistently reinforce that the biggest challenge in today s contact center environment is agent training. Turnover continues to be high; new hire costs are on the rise I ve seen anywhere from $6500 to $10,000 quoted per agent! At the same time, losing customers because of bad call experiences negatively impacts your bottom line. What can you do? How do you justify the training expenditure?
Research has been making a case for how spending in human performance areas such as training, translates into bottom line growth. Accenture's study on the impact of training on ROI has some interesting results. (Smith, David. Y. and Waddington, Ted. Running Training Like a Business: Determining the Return on Investment of Your Learning Programs, Outlook Point of View, March 2003.)
First, in the area of recruitment, training opportunities were among the top three criteria people considered when deciding where they want to work (the others are the opportunity for advancement and a good benefits package).
In the area of productivity, as a result of training, employees were:
17% more productive
20% higher performance levels relative to their peer group
Stayed with the company 14% longer
In the area of retention, employees who had access to the training were:
More than 2 times more likely to expect to be with the company in 2 years
More than 6 times more likely to think the company is a 'great place to work'
More likely to think they are fairly compensated
Dollar figures associated with their statistics for a fiscal year report the annual per person net benefit or $25,324. They multiplied this number by their 50,000 employees yielding a companywide benefit of training of $1.26 million. By dividing the benefit by the cost of one year of training ($358 million), researchers concluded that the ROI (at Accenture) is 353%.
Negative Customer Service Experiences?
How many of you know (and track) what percentage of your calls are bad experiences? Hopefully, you do know the number, and they re in the low single digits.
In a recent study, in answer to (1) did the agent satisfy your needs in the call, and (2) based on any negative experience, would you stop using this company and go to the competition? the results were: