Social Issues in Call Centre

SOCIAL ISSUES IN CALL CENTRE

Staff Attrition in Call Centre

Introduction

With rapidly changing workplaces, unique occupational health hazards are emerging. Traditional industrial health concerns were related more in the physical health domain. Emerging new occupations particularly in Information Technology (IT) and IT enabled Services (ITES), pose a host of new health challenges particularly those related to mental and social health.

BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) has been the latest mantra in India today. For many employees in the call centre sector, "the daily experience is of repetitive, intensive and stressful work, which frequently results in employee "burnout". Call centers are establish to create an environment in which work can be standardized to create relatively uniform and repetitious activities to achieve economies of scale and consistent quality of customer service. This weakens employee autonomy and enhances the potential for management control. Loss of control generally understood to be an important indicator of work related stress.

Statement of the Problem

This study investigated one of the key issues prevailing in the Business Process Outsourcing in which one is Staff attrition.

Research Questions

The research questions that framed this study were as follows:

The factors responsible for staff attrition

The effect of staff attrition in call centre

Discussion

Call centre costs are driven, above all by the cost of labor. In the best-managed call centers, managers and operational staff spend much of their time trying to improve performance. Normally focus on increasing first call resolution, reducing the average processing time and increasing the occupation, which are of course all good things to do.

Management will also look at their rates of attrition, ie the number of employees who voluntarily leave the company and must be replace each year. Call centers are particularly sensitive to this problem with some call centers with the attrition rate of 30% or more per year. If you have a call centre 100, this means that 30 of your employees are leaving each year, to be replaced. The replacement cost of the outgoing can be significant, a loss not only in direct costs of recruitment, but also through production.

Call Management Centre understand this and actively seek to reduce attrition rate by a number of initiatives, such as increasing non-wage benefits, a gym membership, help with childcare, flexible working time Working file (permits), ergonomically designed office space, improve management communication to staff, and make the office a place "nice work".

Sometimes these initiatives may have some success. However, another way of looking at the problem is to look at what are the costs that attrition run and how can they be reduce. This is advertising, recruitment costs and training induction (P Taylor, 2008).

High staff turnover can, as outlined in the introduction to this article, negatively impact on call centre quality because every time a trained agent leaves, fewer are on hand to ensure an optimum level of service. In addition to this, there are heavy costs associated with recruiting, hiring, training and developing new staff - not to mention the costs associated with the dip ...