From 50% Attrition to Single Digits: The Coach Who Built Symtrain

The Teacher Who Took a Detour

Dan McCann always knew what he wanted to be.

"When I was in high school, I wanted to be a teacher and I wanted to coach," he recalls. "That's just what I wanted to do when I grew up."

Life took him through sales careers and business ventures instead. But the coaching instinct never left—and it would eventually reshape an entire industry.

The 50% Problem

Running a call center doing outbound business development, Dan faced a brutal reality: half of his new hires churned within six months.

"For a while, we thought, okay, we get the best 50 to stay. The cream of the crop will stick around," he admits. "And then we started to realize—this isn't fair."

The realization hit hard.

"No human being takes a job and says, 'Hey honey, I'm going to take this job and there's a 50% chance I'm going to have to get a new one six months from now.' We just felt that wasn't fair, wasn't right. So we figured, let's fix it."

Practice Makes Prepared

The solution became Symtrain: give new hires the chance to practice what they're learning, as many times as they need, building confidence while developing skills.

"So you know you're job ready and you know you're prepared," Dan explains. "Any eventuality you face, you can handle it."

The results exceeded expectations.

"These new hires were going on the floor and outproducing some of my best performers," Dan says. "I got that attrition number down to single digits and I just geeked out."

Finally, a Coach

For Dan, Symtrain fulfilled the dream he'd carried since high school—just at a different scale.

"I always wanted to be a coach. I wanted to coach football, I wanted to coach baseball," he reflects. "I'm coaching people way better today than I did over the last eight years. Because I was letting them down before."

The scope still amazes him.

"I don't have to be set with nine baseball players or eleven football players at a time. We could do millions. We could do millions of CX agents."

The Numbers That Matter

Dan gets specific about impact: 5 minutes a day, 15-20 minutes a week, and agents see 3-4x performance increases.

"We're taking NPS scores with some clients from 30-40% up to 80," he shares. "Doubling the overall company performance doing it 4 or 5 minutes a day in terms of exercise."

The Coaching Sandwich

The partnership with AmplifAI represents what Dan calls "embedded coaching"—a continuous cycle where data identifies gaps and practice closes them.

"AmplifAI will coach, analyze data, organize what agents need to do. Then Symtrain comes in and provides the exercises they need to practice and upskill," Dan explains. "It's a perfect fit."