Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

April 02, 2008

High Attrition Continues to be Major Challenge in Contact Center Industry

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

The contact center industry overall faces significant challenges. While these centers often operate as the key interaction point between customers and the company, they can sometimes suffer in performance due to staff shortages, high attrition, budget cuts and other internal challenges.

For the Indian contact center industry, the biggest challenge seems to be employee attrition, agent training and implementing new service channels. These challenges were identified in new research from callcentres.net.

According to the newly released 2008 Asian Contact Center Industry Benchmarking Report, Indian contact center executives are seeking to improve human resource management results by offering financial incentives, reward and recognition programs and better career planning for agents.

While such initiatives can help to drive change within the contact center industry and the individual centers, India still faces the obstacle that the average tenure for an Indian contact center agent is lowest in the region at 9 months.

Sponsored by Autonomy etalk and Genesys (News - Alert), this study included an examination of 539 contact center executives representing 2,488 contact centers and 259,699 contact center seats across Asia, including 107 centers in India.

The study looks at outsourced contact centers (72 percent) and in-house or captive centers (28 percent). These centers reported that agent absenteeism, or sick leave in Indian contact centers had reduced on average from 15 days in 2007 to 9 days per annum in 2008. Despite this improvement, employee tenure remains a critical problem.

As for the rest of the industry, the Global contact center market is projected to reach US$195 billion by 2010, according to a report by Global Industry Analysts. Asia is expected to lead this growth.

North America and Europe continue to dominate and account for about 85 percent of the service revenues. Asia-Pacific holds enormous potential, and is projected to drive growth in the global arena.

The global market is also experiencing changing trends. Major trends creating influence include the expansion of operational costs and budgetary allocations, declining telecommunications costs, a rise the in number of hosted contact centers, and the growing significance of Asian call centers.

The transformation of call centers into contact centers is also expected to have a continuing impact. The report noted that despite its status as the fastest growing employer, contact centers continue to face challenges in the shortage of skilled employees and high employee turnover.

At the end of the day, it is unclear how much these challenges will effectively change and improve over the long term. While many organizations are taking the proper steps to make improvements, it is consistency in strategy that will make the most impact in the end.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.

Contact Center Solutions Glossary of Terms

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O

Featured Whitepaper

Microsoft® Lync® in the Contact Center: Integrating with Customer Interaction Center™ to Provide a Barrierâ€free Customer Experience To implement contact center functionality, organizations using Microsoft Lync Server 2010 can follow the unified communications blueprint of open standards interoperability and integrate to a contact center solution of their choice. Customer Interaction Center (CIC) from Interactive Intelligence is a proven best of breed contact center solution that merits consideration ...

Featured Success Story

Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite integrated with Microsoft Lync helps Bentley save $200,000 annually.

Featured Product Demo

Contact Center Solutions Interaction Analyzer™

Interaction Analyzer™
Real-time word and phrase spotting. Alerting. Analytics. Scoring. Coaching. Watch how Interaction Analyzer turns every moment, of every past and present call, into data that lets you deliver an exceptional customer experience.