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The Impact of Increased Employee Retention on Performance in a Customer Contact Center

Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
ww2040{at}columbia.edu

Amathematical model is developed to help analyze the benefit in contact-center performance obtained from increasing employee (agent) retention, which is in turn obtained by increasing agent job satisfaction. The contact-center performance may be restricted to a traditional productivity measure such as the number of calls answered per hour, or it may include a broader measure of the quality of service, e.g., revenue earned per hour or the number of problems successfully resolved per hour. The analysis is based on an idealized model of a contact center in which the number of employed agents is constant over time, assuming that a new agent is immediately hired to replace each departing agent. The agent employment periods are assumed to be independent and identically distributed random variables with a general agent-retention probability distribution, which depends on management policy and actions. The steady-state staff-experience distribution is obtained from the agent-retention distribution by applying renewal theory. An increasing real-valued function specifies the average performance as a function of agent experience. Convenient closed-form expressions for the overall performance as a function of model elements are derived when either the agent-retention distribution or the performance function has exponential structure. Management actions may cause the agent-retention distribution to change. The model describes the consequences of such changes on the long-run average staff experience and the long-run average performance.

Key Words: contact centers; call centers; retention; employee turnover; churn; agent job satisfaction; compensation; autonomy; stress; stochastic models; renewal theory; stochastic comparisons
History: Received: January 18, 2005; accepted: November 11, 2005.