Causes & remedies for turnover in customer-facing teams.

Turnover occurs when an employee chooses to leave their organization through an act of resignation, termination or job abandonment due to personal volition or situational factors. Employee turnover does not only lead to loss of talent and morale in the workforce, but also leaves the organization facing detrimental consequences.

It is generally said that 1 in 3 employees quit or decide to quit their jobs after about 6 months of employment (SHRM, 2015)*. However, this statistic requires closer evaluation when considering sales and customer-facing teams. Due to their constant dealings with people, on call or on the field, sales employees are susceptible to burnout — a pressing predictor of employee turnover. And with the increasing prevalence of customer-facing teams in organizations, giving more attention to the causes of salesforce turnover is now a requisite.

THE CAUSES

Besides burnout, other universal reasons for employee turnover include discontentment with workplace environments, conflicts with managers, lack of work-life balance and inadequate salary compensations. However, turnover intentions specific to customer-facing domains can range from personal and situational factors to job-related ones:

• Personal & Situational factors of salesforce turnover: Long commutes, work related traveling (field sales), lower morale levels and overwhelming workload due to existing turnover, illnesses and caregiving duties, and midlife crises are some drivers that steer an employee’s decision to quit.
• Job-related factors of salesforce turnover: Employees’ individual perceptions of job stress, fairness or equity; lack of career advancement; and salary expectations are the top most causes of turnover in customer-facing teams. Furthermore, the lack of autonomy and conviction or purpose are other determinants of turnover among these employees.

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EFFECTS

Employee turnover can be extremely expensive for companies and has both direct and indirect effects.

• The direct effects include the cost of recruiting, onboarding and training new employees; the loss of potential sales; and the overall revenue.
• The indirect effects include a loss of corporate memory which impacts the productivity and morale of the employees, causing them to become overburdened with work and increasingly stressed.

Turnover in customer-facing teams such as sales can develop friction between the remaining salespeople when working to achieve targets with fewer resources, negatively affecting the broader customer service processes. Additionally, inexperienced sales employees may further shrink customer accounts and can cause a catastrophic drop in the brand image of the company which may have taken years to build.

COUNTERMEASURES

In order to avoid such ramifications and turnover rates, one significant preventive measure is to make sure that the new employees are accurately hired based on their sales and customer service skills and capabilities. A right hire signifies an engaged employee, and an engaged employee dramatically increases the chance of retention, enhanced revenue, and improved organizational productivity.

• Behavioural skills assessments: To effectively decrease sales personnel turnover, hiring procedures should be incorporated with behavioral skill-based assessments that can precisely measure those skills in an individual that are required to succeed in customer-facing teams. These assessments go beyond simply gauging skills such as communication, and can measure other critical skills like result orientation, and professional reliability that are required to succeed in customer-facing roles. Baking these assessments into the hiring processes can ensure that the candidates being hired will succeed in these roles, and subsequently reduce the likelihood of turnover.

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• Improve engagement: Engagement with one’s work, which depends heavily on whether people are allocated jobs that leverage their skills, can primarily moderate employee motivation and productivity. For example, a customer service employee who is poor at persuasion or analytical thinking may not be engaged or motivated in customer-facing tasks such as conflict resolution and handling customer accounts, a situation that inevitably results in job abandonment. Employee engagement should thus be a primary focus of HR individuals, leaders and other experts trying to reduce turnover rates in their teams.
• Inspiring Leadership: Leaders or supervisors who challenge employees with realistic goals, and lay down clear career pathways through achievement of those goals can enhance optimism and motivation within employees, and improve overall engagement within the teams. But it is important to note that hiring transformative leaders requires evaluating emotional intelligence components, in addition to skills.
• Vision orientation: Turnover in these teams can be curbed by helping employees see the ‘big picture’ of their job roles. Management can align their team members’ goals with the short term or long term mission of the organization, and thereby imbue organizational vision into the purpose of their jobs. This will in turn foster their conviction of singular job tasks and incline them towards professional reliability in the long run.

In order to reduce turnover in customer-facing teams, it is thus vital to implement and evaluate engagement techniques, and also, hire talent with the right skills to succeed in customer-facing roles.