This week is Customer Service Week, which is an international celebration of the importance of customer service and of the people who serve and support customers on a daily basis. At Arema Connect, we pride ourselves on having one of the highest staff retention rates in the industry. We believe that retaining top talent is a fundamental ingredient in delivering top-class customer service on behalf of our clients.
The benefits of retaining talent for Customer Service
Retaining top talent has many benefits to the wider organisation including a reduction in the cost of training and recruitment, improved company culture and better morale to name but a few. Staff retention has a direct impact on your organisation’s Customer Service and those with high retention rates harvest many rewards.
Increased productivity – Staff turnover can have a knock-on effect on productivity in any workplace. The majority of new team members will need time to learn the ropes to become proficient in their roles. In particular, Customer Service hugely benefits from an experienced representative to reduce wait and response times for both in-store and online experiences. Knowledge is most definitely power and this is something that is developed over time.
Better Customer Experience – An experienced team member has the ability to increase customer satisfaction through a greater overall experience. Experienced representatives have the ability to solve any problems or issues more quickly by drawing on past cases. The modern-day consumer has high expectations for resolution times as support channels have become more widely available.
Build relationships -By retaining talent your employees can build relationships with your customers. Human connections and trust become much more valuable to a customer than a discounted price from a competitor. Establishing a relationship with customers enables organisations to better understand their needs and what’s important to them. Of course, these insights become invaluable to maintaining a top-class customer Customer Service Strategy.
Some of the ways we retain top talent at Arema Connect
- Career and progression opportunities – 80% of our Management team began their journey with Arema Connect as frontline support agents. Through career mapping and development, they have continuously progressed in their roles. We understand that is it important to challenge our team to take on new roles and responsibilities in the organisation which we support through coaching and a variety of training models.
- Flexible working schedules – Operating on a 24×7 basis gives us the opportunity to offer our team more flexible working schedules. For example, in recent weeks we have started to support Australian and New Zealand markets for one of our large eCommerce clients for the busy Quater 4 ahead. By doing we will be able to offer additional Night shifts to our frontline team. Many of our part-time positions are held by college students, which works well with varying timetables.
- Upskilling – Working in a rapidly changing industry we encourage our team to upskill in different areas of the business. Our management team strive to create a collaborative and learning-focused environment. The frontline team have access to several internal and external training courses. In recent months many members of the team have completed Lean Sigma White Belt training, Train the Trainer and Management courses to support them in both personal and professional development.
- Reassigning agents to new accounts – Supporting our various client’s seasonality requires a flexible staffing approach. Many of our clients partner with us for our adaptability and capacity to implement projects in fast turnaround times. Agents working on one-off projects for clients are always given the opportunity to be reassigned to another client account when a project comes to an end. This allows us to suitably match skill sets with different client accounts that may be experiencing increased volumes due to seasonality, promotional campaigns or an increase in sales.
On a final note, we would like to wish our team and fellow Customer Service teams a very Happy Customer Service Week!
