Employees leaving their jobs is a common problem across industries, but it’s a major one in IT. However, there’s hope – at least for agent churn rates. A Skillsoft survey raised concern: 53% of IT professionals are considering leaving their current employers due to a decline in job satisfaction rates from 2021 to 2022.
To face this situation, managers and C-levels all over the world are starting to look at employee experience with so much more detail than in previous years. And that’s something you can put into practice with InvGate Service Management.
We’re about to see how to tackle agent turnover in ITSM with our ITSM tool, so fasten your seatbelt because here it comes!
How agent churn affects business
First things first, let's talk briefly about how help desk turnover affects the overall performance of your organization:
- It decreases business productivity: IT support agents are crucial to the success of your company. They keep things up and running, it’s as simple as that. If your business loses agents, the risk of things going off rails increases, meaning that workload grows and there are fewer people to solve incidents.
- It lowers team morale: agent churn makes an impact on the organization's culture and the remaining agents’ commitment to it. Thus, this creates a loop that carries more turnovers and dissatisfaction.
- It increases security risks: fewer agents means fewer people taking care of your cyber security issues, thus increasing the chances of suffering attacks and exposing you to vulnerabilities that may be critical for the overall operations.
- It increases operational costs: replacing agents is expensive. Offboarding and onboarding people is always costly, and you also need to take into consideration the amount of time to properly train new agents.
Why do IT agents leave?
The first step to decreasing agent churn rate is understanding why agents leave. Two of the main reasons are a lack of motivation and poor management feedback.
IT support agents (and probably most workers out there) tend to feel demotivated when they do not have a clear career path. And the situation worsens If they don’t know if what they’re doing is right (or wrong).
However, providing career perspectives for the agents is not something you can do either on your own or in the short run. It requires your company to have a clear strategy and effective planning that involves not only IT management but also HR and C-levels. This way, it can provide specific paths with clear short, mid, and long-term objectives that are aligned with business goals.
How to minimize agent churn with InvGate Service Management
Using InvGate Service Management in your company can make your IT support team optimize their work, feel more comfortable while they're doing it, and overall, work better and happier. Here are some ideas of how you can use our features to stop agent turnover.
Improve IT agents’ motivation with gamification
Gamification is a built-in feature that rewards agents’ work based on a points system, like a game.
You can set your preferred rules to adjust them to your team, and these are some of the things to keep in mind:
- Points can be refreshed at any desired time frame (60 days is the standard) allowing all agents (even new ones) to participate (with chances of winning).
- You can configure not only which actions are rewarded, but also which are penalized.
- You can create quests with a set list of actions or goals that grant points and badges (for instance, first 100 tickets solved, upload a profile picture, create your first knowledge base article).
- You can define the badges that represent achieved objectives.
When this feature is paired with real-life objectives, it becomes a great productivity booster for agents. They feel motivated by the rewards, while the scoring system serves as a constant reminder of their objectives (but in an easygoing way).
And if you’d like to take this one step further, you can get your company to transform the game’s badges and achievements into real-life rewards and benefits.
Keep track of the agents’ workload with Dashboards
Dashboards allow managers to have quick and complete visibility of the day-to-day operations of agents. By creating and sharing dashboards, managers can tackle bottlenecks easily.
Moreover, thanks to the drill downs, they provide detailed data at hand to be informed of the exact amount of backlog any given help desk agent has, how they’re performing (to detect slackers on the team), and the requests’ status.
With InvGate Service Management’s dashboards, managers can analyze every situation and make the right decisions. Does your team need more agents? Do the tasks have to be redistributed? Or is it something else? Thanks to the dashboards, you know.
Encourage the autonomy of agents with the “My Work” menu
“My work” is the menu that allows agents to tackle their pending work. It’s a straightforward way to see how many of the assigned tasks are critical, and which ones are waiting for a certain users' action.
This allows them to be more efficient in their operations – since they can spend less time figuring out what they need to do next, or waiting for the manager's instructions – and be completely in charge of their work and objectives.
Imagine how agents could improve the execution of their work just by having all this data in a single place. This could create a window opportunity for improvements. For example, if an agent knows for a fact that all the tickets in his backlog are waiting for end-users actions, they can dedicate some time to training.
Improve your IT support agents' training and development with an internal knowledge base
The knowledge base is not only a tool for end-users to find solutions to their problems, but it's also a super effective way to train and help agents. By building an internal knowledge base, you can provide them with all the information they could need to resolve a task in one place, and it unifies processes.
Creating it in InvGate Service Management is an easy and intuitive process. You can build it according to each user’s role, allowing admins to define which articles are “public” (for everyone) and which ones are “private” (for agents, managers, and admins).
Furthermore, you can organize it according to categories to provide different sets of permissions to different types of agents. For instance, you could create the category “Infrastructure,” and grant permissions for every agent to see the articles only for the infrastructure team members to edit them.
Also, InvGate Service Management allows you to match the categories of the knowledge base with the service catalog, making it easier for the agents to access the information that they need to solve any given task.
Give agents proper feedback based on accurate reports
Giving feedback to agents helps them to feel more comfortable with their performance. To do it properly, you have to back your feedback with facts so they can see exactly what they did right and where’s room for improvement.
Creating detailed reports with InvGate Service Management is an easy and intuitive process. Managers can do so for any given agent, and include metrics such as the number of requests they processed, the time spent on those requests, and waiting intervals. With this information at hand, service desk managers can provide data-based feedback that improves metrics.
To sum up
Agent turnover in ITSM is one of the major problems that companies have been facing since (at least) 2021. There are many reasons why this happens, including lack of motivation, poor management feedback, unmanageable workload, lack of autonomy, and poor training. However, you can fix all of these with InvGate Service Management:
- Improve IT agents' motivation with gamification.
- Encourage the autonomy of agents with the “My Work” menu.
- Improve agents' training and development with a knowledge base.
- Give agents proper feedback based on accurate reports.
If you want to try it for yourself, just ask for our 30-day free trial and get it started!
