High turnover rates plague the call centre industry. Spending time searching for, hiring, and training sales people for your call centre takes considerable cost and effort, and you don’t want it to go to waste when they quit after a few weeks or month. For many call centres, high churn rates can be devastating to their bottom line. However, there are effective steps you can take to retain sales people at a call centre. The time it will take to implement these steps will be well worth the results of a strong, steady workforce.

Train

If a sales person isn’t closing deals at your call centre, he can start to feel useless and frustrated, making him want to quit because he isn’t producing any results. If you train your staff effectively to make and take calls and sell without any trouble, you’ll be able to motivate and retain sales people. Plus, knowledgeable and confident sales people lead to higher sales numbers.

Get the Staff’s Input

Your staff will know what they want—what can motivate them and keep morale up. People leave jobs quickly if they find no enjoyment out of them. Ask them what they enjoy about their jobs and work towards enhancing these aspects. If you take all the enjoyment out of the job in order to increase efficiency, you could lose a lot of staff members. Of course, you won’t be able to keep all your employees happy, and there are some who won’t be happy no matter what you change, but if you consider your staff’s input and try to implement changes based on it, they’ll feel more valued, which is ultimately what all employees want.

Social Relationships

You won’t be able to retain sales people if you isolate them. Isolating your call centre employees into separate booths and making them take their breaks alone where they aren’t allowed to socialize with other agents will demoralize them quickly. You should be building an environment where teamwork and interactions are encouraged. Come up with team building activities, encourage social interactions as much as you can without affecting productivity, and incentivize your sales people to work together.

Switch Up Responsibilities

If you have to make outbound calls all day every day, you’re going to get bored quickly. There’s more to a call centre than just making calls, and you should be mixing up the responsibilities in order to retain sales people. Add inbound calls, research, and other tasks to your employees’ daily work schedules to boost their morale and reduce their sense of boredom. Sales people like to be challenged with new tasks that they can learn from and contribute to.

Opportunities for Growth

Even your happiest employee is going to want to move up eventually. To retain sales people provide them with opportunities for growth. Hire for higher-up positions in-house, offer them the opportunity to go to training seminars or presentations, and provide them with the tools they need to go grow.

Incentives

Providing incentives is an easy way to retain sales people. They’ll feel more motivated to work towards a goal if you offer them something in return for their hard work. This can be leaving an hour early, a gift card, a bonus, or any other incentive you can come up with that you think will make your staff feel like their work is valued and appreciated.

Curb the Problem

In order to retain sales people, you need to motivate and incentivize them. Loyal, long-term employees can get your company back in alignment, keep your customers happier, save you the time and money associated with hiring, and actually increase your call centre’s productivity through proper motivation. In order to retain sales people, you need to be proactive with effective training and by building an environment and job description that your sales people will actually enjoy.