Exit Interview Questions for Call Center Employees

Employee departures can be tough to handle in the fast-paced environment of a call center. However, even in agent turnover, opportunities to improve your organization’s efficiency and profitability abound.

Exit interviews allow lost talent to tell you what went wrong and what aspects of your call center’s operations could stand to be updated. Read on to learn a few powerful questions worth asking during such interviews to leverage your lost employees’ critical insights.

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The Contact Center QA "X Factor"

Questions About Their Experience

Although the customer experience almost always takes precedence over most other ongoing business concerns, the experience that your organization provides its employees is of equally crucial importance.

The questions below deal specifically with the employee experience, and may potentially enable you to discover important insights that can inform lasting improvements in your contact center.

Why are you leaving?

Asking a departing employee why they have chosen to call it quits with your company can help you assess its most glaring faults more clearly.

Issues that may have led to your employee pulling the plug on their position can range from poor training to insufficient tools. Even basic burnout can keep your employees from coming back.

It is best not to rely on assumptions when employees choose to leave and instead pose the question to them directly to head off existing operational challenges.

What frustrated you?

There are numerous complications with call center work that can frustrate agents enough to make them want to leave. Asking them about their most frustrating experiences can quickly reveal facets of your organization’s operations that need to be fixed.

Common complaints include issues with shift ending times being nudged later by last-minute callers and overbearing management practices. Stamping out such issues entirely requires creativity and commitment to your agents’ satisfaction with their positions.

Were you well-equipped to handle your job?

If employees are ill-equipped to handle the volume of calls expected of them, then burnout is all too likely to follow. However, there are also problems that can arise from agents simply having too many tools to choose from at a given time. Eliminating redundancies in your systems can help alleviate hang-ups with conflicting tools.

If employees respond to this question negatively, it can serve as a surefire sign that a system upgrade of some sort is needed. Following this line of questioning can help in identifying precisely what needs upgrading and what works well as is.

Questions About Your Business

Your business is always complicit in keeping employees satisfied with their jobs. Asking those who have had enough about your company’s problems can help you see where new processes ought to be implemented as well as what parts of your business least accommodate your staff’s expectations.

The following questions shed light on such issues and can guide your efforts in patching up spotty internal procedures.

What could we have improved?

Although there are typically many areas that can be improved in any growing business, it can be hard to determine which are most deserving of your team’s attention at a glance. Asking an employee who has decided to leave about potential improvements that your company can make to ease the difficulties they may have faced on the job is a particularly powerful way to get to the bottom of things in short time.

How was your relationship with your manager?

Manager-employee relations can prove to be complex, yet immensely beneficial arrangements if handled correctly. Unfortunately, this is one area of any call center’s operations where there is a lot of room for error.

Asking employees for feedback on their managers’ performances before they move on can yield valuable insight into any existing issues that have yet to be resolved at management level. Common complications in this area often involve overly strict internal hierarchies and stifled growth prospects. Solving such issues can help keep remaining employees from jumping ship and build lasting loyalty within your workforce.

Was proper feedback provided on the job?

Feedback complements every employee’s journey in the workplace, providing them with the kind of in-depth guidance they need to succeed at their roles. A breakdown in this area can quickly spell disaster not only for their performance on the job, but their overall morale as well.

By inquiring about the quality of the feedback departing employees received, you can break down bad habits among management personnel and make positive changes for the rest of your team. Issues with appropriate timing of feedback from superiors, excessive negativity or an absence of avenues for employees to make their own voices heard among superiors can all pose threats to agent enthusiasm and employee engagement.

Interviewing lost talent can provide you with the information your organization needs most to improve. The questions above are a great place to start when it comes to deriving value from employee churn in your call center.

How does your business approach exit interviews with departing talent?