February
On the 12th of February, Katy Forsyth, Red's MD, chaired the first South West Contact Centre Forum and Northern Contact Centre Forum HR & Recruitment User Group of 2025. It was a great session of discussion between contact centre professionals.
The session focused on what the key people's strategies are for 2025 across the industry. These were varied, including:
- Retention, both of early and established talent
- Managing sickness and absence
- Recruitment, strategies and dealing with urgent requests
- Developing Agent skills and developing professional Agent steps
- Engagement and driving values and behaviours
- Onboarding and new starter journeys
- External staff training
Unsurprisingly, attrition was the number one concern and retention of both new talent and those with a '2-year itch' was the number one priority for strategic improvement. The sessions group largely agreed that this is a top concern within their operation and a key focus for the year.
There were some great ideas floated, hints to make a fast impact on improving retention. Flexibility was a key theme when it came to retaining Agents, one business stated they are now ‘much more forgiving’ for lateness and absence, as it is easier to keep an Agent who has already developed the skills and knowledge needed to do the role, than to lose them based on absence and train a new individual during peak periods. Another business said that flexible working patterns (with the majority of their contact centre being on agreed requests) meant they had reduced attrition to sub 20%.
Attendees again proved that higher salaries directly result in better retention. We know from the data that money remains the number one driver for Agents (as it is for any UK worker earning less than £50,000 p/a). That is not new, but many of the businesses on yesterday’s session who are recruiting in highly competitive areas agreed that it is a higher salary that is most important for Agents, and benefits do not significantly help attraction.
There were lots of key takeaways yesterday, and we’re now looking forward to April’s session, during which we are focusing on retaining new starters. We hope to see many of you join us then.
March
Phone waiting times for public services could be cut in half after a successful AI trial
"Last year, Agent Assist was the contact centre industry’s priority for tech investment (according to survey results).
This article highlights the Government services’ journey to making their Agent experience top-class in a bid to improve CX. Of course, there are many examples of this type of AI that have been successfully working in the private sector for some time now.
In this example Government state Agent Assist AI has reduced handling time by half, from 8 minutes to 4 minutes in Citizens Advice. With these call times, I presume these are relatively straightforward signposting calls rather than complex queries.
Developed by internal teams, this is great news for agents, businesses (or taxpayers) and customers and further progress for the industry to help us cope with demand. I am, however, left wondering why journalists writing articles like this don’t ask for the Agents’ feedback. What’s their user experience like, how has it changed their job experience and engagement in the role, and do they feel like they are providing quality FCR as a result?"
If you have spoken to your Agents regarding this topic or you would like to discuss this further with me, please give me a call. I would be pleased to discuss this in greater detail.
