How did a fintech accelerate agent training speed and put the brakes on attrition at the same time?

The goal

To reduce the time to competence for new-hire agents in the German market, lower agent attrition rates, and streamline approaches to learning and development across its ecosystem of outsourcing partners.

The outcome

25%

reduction in time to competence

82

weeks cumulative cost savings

0%

attrition after 90 days

The challenge

One of the first fintechs, our client is the German division of a ground-breaking U.S.-headquartered, multinational online payment and money transfer company that was instrumental in the development of e-commerce and that today provides its services to consumers and businesses of all sizes.

Demand for the client’s services in Germany is at a record high, so much so that it was struggling to recruit and train sufficient agents to provide B2B and B2C CX support. One of the challenges to expanding its CX operations in line with its growing customer base was the time taken to train new recruits. With its existing approach, it took 16 working days for a newly hired agent to be able to go live and start resolving customer issues.

Another sizeable issue was the fact that it was seeing an agent attrition rate of 24% within the first 90 days and 45% the following 90 days. A third problem was that because the client uses an ecosystem of CX delivery partners, each of those providers was potentially delivering that initial agent training in a different way.

The solution

Support delivered from Germany to B2B and B2C customers in the German market

Language
German

Our client asked our learning and development team — who had been instrumental in designing the existing training materials — to evaluate the current situation and propose a new training approach that would help address these challenges and that could be adopted by its other CX delivery partners. Within six weeks, our team developed a solution called the Early Bird approach.

How it works

The Early Bird approach uses tenured agents to deliver structured daily mentoring to reinforce theoretical aspects of new-hire training. In doing so it:

  • Helps to minimize the fear of failure new hires often have
  • Increases confidence in using tools and processes
  • Makes topics easier to understand and absorb
  • Creates a supportive learning environment
  • Improves team dynamics and creates strong collegial bonds

Results

25%

reduction in time to competence

82

weeks cumulative cost savings

0%

attrition after 90 days

As it takes just 12 working days to complete, the Early Bird approach is 25% faster than our client’s existing method. But as well as being faster, Early Bird agents are better prepared. In their first week of call handling, Early Bird agents averaged a 56% NPS compared with 29% for agents trained in the traditional way.

In terms of talent retention, Early Bird agents have a 21% attrition rate within the first 90 days (compared with 24% for agents trained with the existing approach). Yet, following 90 days, the attrition rate is 0% (compared with 45% for the existing approach). This initial success saw the approach rolled out across all CX delivery partners and used to train 145 agents delivering cumulative savings of 82 weeks and counting.