Better training and coaching are among the most overlooked tools available to businesses working to reduce staff turnover in their contact centers.
Turnover is “not just a retention or an HR problem,” said Jeannie Walters, founder and chief experience investigator at Experience Investigators. “It really becomes a customer experience problem because if you have inconsistent experiences as a customer, that erodes trust.”
Staff turnover remains a stubbornly persistent issue for contact centers, running 40% to 45% a year, or as high as three times the rate of most other industries, according to staffing firm Insignia Resources. That ultimately leads to higher costs due to having to hire and train new employees.
And it can lead to worse customer experiences.
When experienced agents leave, their knowledge goes with them, said Nate Brown, co-founder and executive director of CX Accelerator, a nonprofit community for customer experience professionals. The agents who replace them can’t fill their shoes right away, and customers feel it.
“The overall quality of service that you’re going to receive is going to be considerably less,” Brown said.
But the deeper cost is the business lost, said Shep Hyken, a customer service and customer experience expert.
“You’re only as good as your weakest employee,” Hyken said.
If a customer speaks with an undertrained agent, he added, that experience becomes their impression of the brand as a whole. In Hyken’s 2026 State of Customer Service & CX report, 80% of customers said inconsistent information would likely make them switch or leave a brand.
Inconsistent information is usually a training failure, Hyken said. When an agent gives the wrong answer, it's often because no one taught them the right one to begin with.
Training isn’t one-and-done
High turnover, and the problems that come with it, however, isn’t inevitable. The contact centers with the highest customer satisfaction often hold turnover to 10% or less, far below the industry norm, according to SQM Group, a data and software company that helps contact centers boost CX.
What sets them apart, experts say, is that they never treat training as finished.
“Training isn’t something you did,” Hyken said. “It’s something you do.”
Even the best employees need it, he said, comparing it to elite athletes who still work with coaches.
However, the training people get is often too thin. Too many programs stay “remedial,” Brown said, focusing on transferring information rather than preparing agents for the actual work.
Treating onboarding as the finish line also tells experienced agents, “We’re not investing in you anymore,” Walters said.
Everything that happens after onboarding is essential to reducing turnover.
“Ongoing coaching is almost more important than training,” Walters said.
That's largely because of the timing. Feedback that comes two weeks after a bad call just feels like punishment for something the agent can barely remember, Walters said. Coaching in the moment — a quick “that sounded like a tough call, let’s figure out what we can do differently” — sticks, Walters said. It’s also important to offer praise for calls that go well.
Why agents stay
Peer-to-peer relationships are the biggest reason contact center workers stay loyal over time, according to Brown. When people are trained and coached as part of a team, that does more to build trust between an agent and the company than any amount of product knowledge.
Brown calls the onboarding window a chance to “anchor and accelerate” by building enough psychological safety so that new hires feel secure before being asked to grow. They stay, he said, when they feel like “a valued member of a team.”
Confidence encourages staff to stay as well, as agents who can actually answer a customer’s question are more fulfilled and less likely to burn out.
“Employees like to learn, whether they say it or not,” Hyken said.
But poor management can undo even the best training and coaching. Constantly grading agents, putting them “under the gun” and berating them over missed metrics will push them out the door, Hyken said.
Good training has to account for how hard the work is and help agents build resilience, rather than pretend they have no feelings of their own.
“Empathy is a finite resource,” Walters said.
Why brands need a mission statement
Training cannot prepare an agent for everything that might happen during a customer interaction.
“The biggest mistake I see is that we oversimplify this job,” Walters said. “Expecting training to address every single situation is a fool's game."
Agents need guidance, such as a customer experience mission statement, when a conversation goes off-script. Without it, agents are forced to guess, leading to inconsistent responses.
“The customer feels that,” Walters said, and trusts the company less.
For Brown, it comes back to the two things training has to get right: giving people a team they feel part of and building the confidence to help customers.
"If you do that, you’re going to achieve loyalty," Brown said.
Ultimately, effective training and coaching can both reduce staff turnover and boost CX, experts say.
“The employee experience in the contact center is totally connected to the experience delivered to customers,” Walters said. “That’s just a fact, and I feel like sometimes we overlook that.”
