Attrition rates for contact centre agents are on the up again after three years of decline, but are forecast to keep on rising into the foreseeable future.
According to contact centre industry analysts, ContactBabel, the mean annual turnover rate for UK call centre staff increased to 21% in 2011 from a six-year low of 16% in 2010, marking a year-on-year leap of 31%.
The firm also predicted that churn rates would continue to grow over the next few years, reaching 26% by 2014. The outsourcing, retail, services and telecoms industries were anticipated to be hardest hit by high staff turnover levels, however.
But the report’s author, Steve Morrell, said that the increase in the figures did not necessarily equate to doom and gloom. “Although 2011 has seen a jump in agent attrition rates, this is not necessarily a bad thing as high attrition tends to go hand-in-hand with economic growth as more opportunities arise inside and outside the contact centre industry,” he explained.
Historically, the industry average for attrition tended to be about 25% when the economy was a healthy, growing one. But some 36% of the survey’s respondents had reported very low rates of less than 10% “so any jump in attrition is not yet industry-wide”, Morrell added.
The findings were published in ContactBabel’s benchmarking survey of 208 UK contact centres across all sectors and sizes.
