03.04.2008 Contact centre staff attrition - part 1 |
Contact centre staff attrition is certainly one of the key issues in the Call Center Market worldwide. Softigator member Steve Morrell from Call Centre Research specialists ContactBabel shows us the latest key results from the UK Contact Centre market. This report is an extract of the UK Contact Centre Operational Review. Today we publish part 1 of this serial.
The UK Contact Centre Operational Review (5th edition - 2007) is a study of the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of 211 UK contact centre operations. Taking a random sample of the industry, a detailed structured questionnaire was asked to contact centre managers and directors: the result - the 5th edition of the largest and most comprehensive study of all aspects of the UK contact centre industry - is now available.
The report covers 18 key areas of contact centre performance and operation:
• Recruitment and Salaries
• Attrition and Absence
• Training
• Flexible Working
• Outsourcing
• Security and Disaster Recovery
• Headsets
• CRM
• Contact Centre Performance
• IP and Call Handling
• Quality and Customer Satisfaction
• Hosted and Network-based Solutions
• Information and Planning
• Outbound and Call Blending
• Speech Technology
• Multimedia
• Location
• Contact Centre Strategy
This article focuses upon the steadily increasing levels of staff attrition in the contact centre, and the problems caused by this.
Contact centre staff attrition - key findings
• Mean agent attrition rates are running at 32% per year
• This is the fifth successive annual rise
• Attrition decreases performance and customer satisfaction, lowers morale and increases training and recruitment costs
• The three main causes of contact centre agent attrition are lack of opportunity, the repetitive nature of the work and low pay
• Businesses that offer agents a chance to gain external qualifications have fewer problems with staff attrition
• Providing a range of tasks also decreases attrition rates
• Contact centres that do not have problems with staff attrition pay agent salaries that are an average of £1,115 higher than attrition-hit businesses
Agent attrition
The conventional wisdom has always been that contact centre staff attrition rates are sky-high, typically running at upwards of 40%. A few years ago, this was easily dismissed as a fallacy driven in large part by the experiences of a few large, high-profile contact centres. However, in each of the past five years, staff attrition rates have crept up until they now stand at a point where perception and reality are actually starting to meet.
This year’s figure for mean average staff turnover is 32%, which is considerable, yet the median (midpoint of all respondents’ answers) was significantly less, at 20%. This shows that there are a number of contact centres with very high attrition rates which are pulling the mean average upwards.
Table 1: Staff attrition rates by vertical market
Vertical market Annual attrition rate
Outsourcing 54%
Services 50%
Finance 32%
Retail and Distribution 30%
Telecoms 23%
Public Sector 18%
Transport and Travel 15%
IT 14%
Mean average 32%
Median average 20%
Attrition causes varying levels of problem, depending if the business has planned for them, so we have dug a bit deeper into the problems caused by attrition, rather than simply look at a top-line figure. Of some concern, more than half of operations say that their churn rates are causing problems. Even outsourcer reports having attrition problems in 57% of cases, despite many having built higher levels of attrition into their business plans.
As is usual in most countries, the outsourcing sector has the highest rate of attrition, being relatively poorly-paid and often involving short-term contracts which require shedding staff on a regular basis. The services sector (which this year includes directory enquiries) also has high average levels of attrition. The higher-skilled and better-paid IT sector reports the lowest level of agent attrition.
See the next part of the serial "Contact centre staff attrition" by Steve Morrell soon here on Softigator. |
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