The News: Contact center automation solutions provider Intradiem has introduced a solution that can put hard data to agent burnout and help to predict agent attrition. The solution can predict churn accurately 80% of the time, and that level of accuracy is expected to rise to 90% or more by 2024. More information on this new attrition predictor can be found on the website.
Intradiem Launches Contact Center Attrition Indicator
Analyst Take: Intradiem focuses on contact center automation solutions. In general, these types of solutions can help provide efficiency and productivity gains, ease contact center operations, and help to support a more friction-free customer and agent experience. Intradiem works to deliver in-year payback on their automation solutions (and has been successful doing so), drive employee engagement/retention, and deliver better CX. This latest introduction, the Burnout and Attrition Predictor, provides benefit to all three of these categories.
Agent churn is disruptive, expensive, and demoralizing. It is an enormous problem in the industry and one that many companies in the segment are heightening focus on, approaching it via a variety of strategies.
I was recently able to chat with Intradiem about the company’s new solution that predicts churn and offers recommendations on actions that can be taken before that employee decides to walk out the door. Chief Marketing Officer Tom Russell and VP of Product Management Chris Busbee walked me through the solution and the Intradiem focus on being a people-first solution provider.
The High Cost of Agent Turnover
“Our brand ethos is technology in the service of human beings. Our thesis is contact center complexity is surpassing what people can handle and process today. Agents have higher expectations than they used to have and still customers are having inconsistent experiences,” said Russell.
It leaves contact centers with a lot of challenges to work on. Agent attrition is estimated at 40%-70% annually, with some organizations turning over their entire agent populations each year. Replacing a single agent can cost $20,000 to $35,000, and it is very difficult to fill these jobs.
“We have seen this pain point, and Intradiem really started to look at it from a point of view of – what is causing agent burnout? We knew that we had a ton of data flowing through our systems that contained some of those signals and indicators, and that led to our development of the Burnout and Attrition Indicator,” explained Russell.
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“As a company that has been in the contact center space for years, we have had our own hypotheses about agent burnout. We also have access to data, so we decided to explore whether our hypotheses were correct. We stood up a machine learning and AI team and built an ML model to do some investigation and data science analysis on the data. It was a successful project, and from a diagnostic perspective it was a proof point that we did have the data to predict burnout and attrition. Our first product was a set of dashboards so that supervisors could see where their employees are in their burnout risk journey,” said Busbee.
Intradiem’s Burnout and Attrition Predictor takes in a broad range of data from the contact center including information from automatic call distribution (ACD) and workforce management (WFM) systems. Inputs could include data points such as average handle time, time in after call work, time on hold, average time on call, average handling time, and average occupancy. These data points are a baseline for customers, and they can give Intradiem additional data that is more specific to their organization such as reason codes for agent attrition, as well whether a departure was voluntary or involuntary. It can be even more granular and can include data points such as first call resolution and customer satisfaction (CSAT). The more specific the data, particularly if it is company specific, the more accurate the model will be for that customer.
I wondered how the model could ensure that contact center managers were getting a long-term view and not just a peek into someone’s workflow who could simply be having a bad week or two. According to Intradiem, to ensure its providing a robust and accurate view, it considers hourly and longer-term performance data and blends it to account for seasonality and other variations. Each agent then can be categorized into a burnout risk category – low, moderate, high, or critical. According to Busbee, the model needs about 8 to 10 weeks of data for the model to be predictive at an 80% level.
The data indicators are updated on an hourly basis and agent scores are reaggregated daily. Supervisors can access a dashboard at any time, and there are filtering abilities so that they can see different levels of specificity such as individual agents, groups, or business units, as well as by manager. Leaders can also see the evolution of burnout over time to see what is getting better and what is not improving.
Once an employee is deemed at risk, supervisors can be notified and the solution will also provide recommendations. The solution will help to answer the question of what next when faced with what could be alarming data.
The Burnout and Attrition Indicator also recommends specific actions. These could include one-to-one meetings with supervisors, schedule and work queue changes, support on specific skills and training, additional breaks, etc. Some of these will be automatically scheduled or delivered through Intradiem.
Intradiem positions itself as a company that is building its solutions with a constant eye on agent support and well-being, as evidenced by its recent announcement of its partnership with Thrive Global. Thrive Global offers solutions that help contact center agents “reset” in real time with calming visuals and audio and breathing prompts in line with its corporate goal of being a people-first solution.
More of these agent-supporting types of technologies are being talked about and developed, which is a good thing for contact centers that often know there are issues but do not have the capacity or technical expertise to identify specific challenges. Data-supported metrics such as attrition predictors as well a robust plan to keep a pulse on how agents are doing through feedback and voice of the employee programs can help provide focus on the most specific and impactful actions that need to be taken for positive agent experience that will result in better CX and company savings.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
