Asian call center attrition high

By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 18:59:00 11/22/2009

Filed Under: Infotech, business process outsourcing (BPO)


MANILA, Philippines – With the growth of contact centers across Asia, particularly in the Philippines, there is a general idea that contact center agents never stay any longer than two years in their job and thus look for other opportunities.

A report by Datacraft showed that Asian contact centers have high attrition rates among other regions with contact center industries.

The study covered 554 respondents from 36 countries. The regions included in the study are Asia, America, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, United Kingdom, and Africa and the Middle East.

While the attrition rate of Asian contact centers is high at 23.3 percent, employers in this region are more expectant of this figure, stating that employment training is of such high quality that employees are more confident to look for better opportunities in other companies.

Datacraft Asia General Manager for Converged Communications and Customer Interactive Solutions Nagi Kasinadhuni told local media that contact center employees know that their industry is still in its growth spurt, thus making them realize that there could be better opportunities from other organizations.

“They are also motivated by higher salaries and that they want to maximize their learning,” Kasinadhuni said.

The Datacraft report showed that operating costs of Asian contact centers for recruitment is just 2.7 percent of their total operating budget while budget for motivational or social events is only 1.6 percent.

Asian contact centers also set aside 62.7 percent of their annual operating budget to salaries, which is still a middle ground compared to salary allocations by contact centers in other regions.

On the other hand, Kasinadhuni said that contact center employers generally accept the high attrition of employees. In fact, they note that their “return-on-investments” on contact center agents is realized in around 24 months, just about the same period when employees start leaving for greener pastures.

Kasinadhuni also noted that agent absenteeism among Asian contact centers is pegged at 12.6 percent, compared to just 21.1 percent for other regions.

Still, the Datacraft study noted that contact center operators are not as worried about attrition rate. Instead, the majority of Asian call center operators are more concerned about customer retention, quality of service, and uniformity of business processes.

Staff retention was a relatively smaller concern for these companies.

Kasinadhuni said companies would want to grow the value of their customers, to generate more revenues from interaction with them, especially as part of their plans to maximize operational budget.