Chicago , IL - February 16, 2006 - We all know that a company is only as good as its employees. Therefore, hiring and retaining top employees is a mission-critical part of any call center's operations strategy. Based on our own experience, and from consulting with hundreds of client call centers, the following are PeopleScout's Top Ten Practices for keeping its call center staffed with productive and effective agents.

1. Acquire Talent. People are your product. Your company should have a commitment to secure talented individuals with a high ability to perform in an organization that expects operational excellence. To hire the best people your company must have a standardized selection process to distinguish top performers from mediocre employees. This is best achieved by establishing a multi-tier process that moves quality candidates through the process in a timely manner, ensuring that exceptional people are recognized and given reason to stay.

2. Establish a Culture where Excellence is the Norm. Talented performers expect excellence throughout the organization. Empower your employees to add value at all levels. With this approach, accountability at all levels is a natural byproduct. Build a "pride factor" into your deliverables to create an environment where the entire population is committed to ensuring that everyone is contributing to a strong work product. In essence, client satisfaction should be as important to your call center agents as to a director or manager in client services.

3. Be Flexible. Every day call centers struggle with the immense challenges of meeting client needs and juggling hundreds of individual schedules and requests. Talented and experienced employees return performance and loyalty to employers who are flexible and considerate of work/life balance. Organizations that deploy rigid, inflexible scheduling exclude excellent pools of employees that offer significant people advantages. Your company should designate one full-time employee to coordinate schedule flexibility for call center agents. The result: higher employee retention as your company works with employees around their school, family and outside interests. The extra cost of a full-time resource in scheduling is returned in 20 additional employees staying with the company on an annual basis.

4. Recognize, Recognize, Recognize. While optimal work performance is expected, without question, everyone enjoys recognition. In addition to monthly and annual awards for outstanding performance, do not miss opportunities to acknowledge effort in other meaningful ways. Financial incentives are only one way to recognize employees. Encourage executives and managers to walk the call center floor and personally congratulate and thank agents who are doing exceptional work. For example, your company could personally thank every call center employee by mailing a handwritten birthday card from the vice president of operations, acknowledging the importance of their contribution and letting them know how much you enjoy having them as part of your team. Exercise creativity in recognizing employees, and understand that the biggest impact does not always come from a financial reward.

5. Understand Impact and Target Incentives Accordingly. Incentives are a great way to add some extra energy around initiatives that need added attention. When determining an incentive program it is important that you understand what the improved behavior gets you in terms of returning dollars to the business. Everyone understands the importance of attendance within the call center industry. Your company should clearly define the worth of perfect attendance and structure an incentive program accordingly. One example: "Neglect your Rent," a program paying an employee's monthly rent or mortgage (up to $1,200 for full-time employees and $600 for part-time) for eligible employees with perfect attendance. Agents with perfect attendance are entered into a raffle in which one agent is randomly selected to receive free rent. This program drives excitement and also incites agents to go the extra step to arrive on time and keep their attendance record clean.

6. Share Information. Companies that are the best at what they do don't hoard information; they share it. By letting your employees know what is going on at the company they become better employees and develop into a stronger part of your network. Develop a weekly newsletter to include with each employee's paycheck. The newsletter introduces new employees to the company, lists agents who received perfect quality scores, highlights birthdays for that week and provides client information. Your company should also have a corporate intranet site that agents can check to stay informed about all the latest company and industry news.

7. Train for Career Progression. Opportunity for advancement has an unmatched impact on keeping employees motivated. By staffing your call center operation with talented and professional employees your company can create a built-in cherry-picking system for other departments. In this way, employees that started as call center agents can move on to higher positions within the organization. Hiring from within the company also has a significant impact on time to fill and overall recruiting costs.

8. Mentor and Build Teams. All agents, especially new agents, need a mentor to guide them through their career. Your company should foster a mentorship atmosphere to develop tomorrow's leaders and maintain our culture of excellence. Use a variety of methods to ensure all your employees are a valuable, contributing part of your team - and you will uncover problems that may have not been noticed otherwise.

9. Be Current. Only by using the latest technology can a call center offer its customers the best service and retain its best employees. Create agent focus groups to identify technology issues and brainstorm about future enhancements. By interacting and performing as a team to identify and tackle technology issues, you will improve your overall product and help retain quality talent.

10. Take Time for Fun. In the call center industry, attitude on the phone is vital to quality. Only by creating a comfortable, welcoming atmosphere can your company ensure a positive attitude from your agents, and enjoy reduced turnover as well. Providing recreational facilities and break areas where employees at all levels of the company can socialize improves overall morale. By inviting top-performing agents to company functions such as awards dinners, and by rewarding them with perks such as event tickets, your company will be able to keep "Call Center Burn-out" to a minimum.

Karen Browne is Vice President of PeopleScout, an outsourced candidate screening and processing solutions company; a high-tech, high-touch solution to recruitment needs.

About PeopleScout
PeopleScout is a division of SeatonCorp, a best-in-class staffing and recruiting company recently named by Crain's Chicago Business as one of Chicago's largest privately held companies. PeopleScout is a leading provider of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) services aimed at helping companies with their exempt and non-exempt hiring needs. The firm's suite of services includes RPO, employment branding, on-boarding, and employee retention. Annually, PeopleScout facilitates over 184,000 hires via partial-cycle RPO engagements and end-to-end RPO engagements. Industries served include airline, financial services, telecommunications, retail, utilities, insurance, pharmaceutical, and transportation.

PeopleScout's clients include some of the more recognizable names in the Fortune 500 list of companies. PeopleScout has succeeded in being selected for four consecutive years to HRO Today Magazine's Baker's Dozen - the closely watched list of industry - leading RPO providers - as well as being named #1 in large deal capabilities. The firm also has also been recognized as the #1 RPO Provider by The Black Book of Outsourcing on its "2008 Top Ten HRO: Recruitment Process Outsourcing/RPO" list. For more information, please visit us at www.peoplescout.com or call 800-966-4803.

For More Information
Gerry Sullivan
Vice President, Solutions Development
(312) 915-5036
gsullivan@peoplescout.com