{"id":9112,"date":"2021-05-26T16:48:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T15:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/?p=9112"},"modified":"2023-01-16T17:30:58","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T17:30:58","slug":"part-10-call-centre-trends-staff-retention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/part-10-call-centre-trends-staff-retention\/","title":{"rendered":"Part 10: Call Centre Trends: Staff Retention"},"content":{"rendered":"

The previous post in this series looked at the overall contact centre<\/a> market. We discovered that the niche is a robust and growing one. We also saw that firms in the field are excited about their avenues for growth in the coming years, though maybe this will be adjusted in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. That doesn\u2019t mean, however, that those businesses don\u2019t face significant challenges.<\/span><\/p>\n

Staffing is an area in which many of contact centres\u2019 biggest hurdles emerge. Earlier in our series, we discussed the nuanced challenge of <\/span>workforce management (WFM)<\/span>. One of the many aspects of WFM is tracking and responding to staff attrition. Attrition or turnover is the rate at which employees leave a business. That may be by quitting, getting fired, retiring, or other related processes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Staff turnover at contact centres is often high. That makes it an issue that operators must understand and tackle to be successful. In this post, we\u2019re going to examine precisely how they do so. First, we\u2019ll cover how bad staff turnover is at contact centres, and why. Then, we\u2019re going to look at the latest industry thinking on staff retention. Particularly, we\u2019ll focus on how centres try to keep their best workers.<\/span><\/p>\n

How Bad is Staff Turnover at Contact Centres & Why?<\/span><\/h2>\n

No workforce is entirely static. Whatever the industry or business, workers come and go as their circumstances change or careers develop. It\u2019s necessary, too, for every company \u2013 at least on occasion \u2013 to let staff go. In the contact centre niche, though, staff turnover is exceptionally high. It\u2019s a well-known and broadly lamented aspect of the industry.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many people who get jobs<\/a> in contact centres see them precisely that way. They view them as jobs rather than careers. Workers often pass through and don\u2019t stick around. <\/span>Research carried out by Contact Babel<\/span><\/a> shows how perennial the issue is in the industry. Mean agent attrition rates in the UK have remained stubbornly above 20% each year since 2005:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Source: <\/b>Contact Babel<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Further <\/span>research from the Global Call Centre Research Network<\/span><\/a> is even more illuminating. It shows that high attrition is a global trait of the contact centre field. Their study suggests that on the other side of the Atlantic, turnover is even higher. In outsourced contact centres it stands at an extraordinary 36%. Let\u2019s put that into some context. It means that on average, around one in three centre workers will leave in the course of a year.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the end of the story, either. Attrition rates are even higher in certain types of contact centre. A US-based study suggests that in the largest centres, the rate can stand at <\/span>as much as 44%<\/span><\/a>. Workforces in the call centre industry, therefore, are far more transitory than most.<\/span><\/p>\n

All that evidence of high attrition in the niche begs a specific question. That is the question of why workers leave their positions so often. There\u2019s no one definitive answer. Instead, there are a range of factors. They all contribute to the feeling from workers that contact centre work is a stopgap:<\/span><\/p>\n