Why Are Call Center Attrition Rates High, and How Do You Avoid Agent Attrition?

A few years ago, I took up a consulting assignment to set up the customer support function for a technology organization.

When I went there, I understood that they already have a function established with people from different departments managing customer support alongside their existing work. Besides, they had recruited some bright engineering graduates with excellent communication skills to work in the customer support function.

There was no defined head for the customer support function, and a few of them together were helping these fresh recruits get a feel of what was expected. These fresh recruits were not told what their career path would look like.

The very first step I took was to ensure that they recruited someone to lead the customer support function.

Once that was out of the way, I started to work with the customer support head to define their

process in a manageable and sustainable manner.

Besides, we ensured that there was a defined career path for all their support engineers. They would eventually move into consulting, product management, and product marketing in a few years.

This ensured that their attrition levels in the support function remained very minimal.

Similarly, in any call center, the attrition rates are directly proportional to the nature of the jobs they do, and without a defined career path, most of them use this as an option till they get something better to do.

Besides these, what do you have to contend with as a call center agent?

A few critical issues include long hours, high call volumes, angry customers, and repetitive scripts. It would take enormous efforts to pull yourself to go to the office every day with these issues to contend with.

So, defining the career path is key to keeping attrition levels low in a call center. After all, everyone needs to have something to look forward to.

What Is Agent Attrition?

It is the rate at which customer service agents leave your organization, either voluntarily or involuntarily, over a given period.

Why is it critical?

• Hiring and training new agents is prohibitively expensive
• High attrition influences customer experience negatively
• It damages employee morale and the culture of the organization

It is only a symptom. We have to understand the types and root causes for you to reduce the attrition rate.

Types of Attrition

Involuntary Attrition

You let the agents go due to poor performance, misconduct, or redundancy. You don’t have to be worried about this as it is a positive outcome for your organization.

Functional Attrition

This is when low-performing agents leave, which again is a positive outcome.

Voluntary Attrition

When agents leave on their own due to better opportunities, burnout, lack of career progression, and dissatisfaction. This is a red flag, and you should try to avoid these situations as an organization.

Dysfunctional Attrition

This is when your best agents quit. The possible reasons would include frustration, lack of recognition, and stalled career growth. This is a definite red flag, and you should go out of your way to arrest this attrition.

What Causes Agent Attrition?

Attrition is rarely caused by just one factor. It is always a combination of challenges that wears an agent down over time.

Let us look at some of the most common causes, along with examples.

Monotony and Repetition

What if you are tasked to read the phone book every day? Would you be interested in doing it?

Your experience would be similar if you had to do things repetitively, like answering the same type of questions every day and reading from scripts.

Would you look forward to this experience?

I was talking to a telecom contact center recently. I was told that 90% of an agent’s shift is spent answering this one question:

How do I check my bill?

They then introduced a chatbot to answer FAQs and repurposed agents to resolve disputes. This improved their agent engagement by 60%.

High Stress and Burnout

Imagine if you have to work 70 to 90 hours a week. Is that a great environment to be in?

You are in the midst of constant call queues, tight performance metrics, back-to-back angry callers, and pressure to keep average handling time (AHT) low.

This is what I would define as a pressure cooker environment, and sooner rather than later, you would be stressed, and you would experience burnout.

This would mean an abnormal increase in stress-related absenteeism. The need here would be to rotate mental wellness breaks that would reduce absenteeism considerably.

Lack of Career Growth

Have you ever been stuck in the same role for more than a year? This is the worst possible place for any employee to be in, and they would ideally love to move out.

When agents don’t see a path beyond being an ‘agent,’ they disengage. What if there is no internal mobility, no upskilling, and no long-term vision?

This would mean a short stay for anyone who has skills.

We worked with a BPO, where we found that agents who were promoted or cross-skilled within 12 months had a 2X higher retention rate. They launched a career development program that reduced attrition by more than 50%.

This is the biggest reason for attrition in any call center. While the rest of the reasons can be addressed by technology, lack of career growth has to be addressed at an organizational level.

Beyond these, there are various other reasons why agents leave an organization. They include:

• Low pay and no performance-based incentive structure
• Cliques, favoritism, poor onboarding, lack of peer support, absence of psychological safety, a bad supervisor, micromanagement, and lack of appreciation can be a huge reason for attrition.
• Unclear job expectations, lack of autonomy, lack of tools or poor technology infrastructure, lack of recognition, and lack of connection to the brand and mission can be a catalyst towards attrition.

Do you know the cost of replacing your best agents?

It can be anywhere in the range of $3000 to $10000, depending on your region and the complexity of the role.

You should ideally look toward solving all of these issues, especially the lack of a career path, to ensure that your bottom line is not affected.

What Is the Average Attrition Rate in Call Centers?

The global average for call center attrition is 30 to 45%.

In some BPOs, attrition can go up to 50%.

However, when you look at in-house or high-skill contact centers, the attrition rate can be as low as 15%. This low attrition can be directly attributed to a well-defined career path and growth for the agents.

How Do You Reduce Attrition in Call Centers?

The best advice that I can give is to ask this one question to your best agents:

Why are you still here?

Use their insights to shape your policy for every agent. You are likely to find success in reducing attrition considerably.

Involve Your Agents

Your agents are the face of your industry, and they are the first contacts for your customers. Use their insights to understand what is happening on the ground. When they feel heard and know their opinion is shaping the customer experience function of the organization, they are likely to stay and grow.

Right Metrics Are Key

Throw away metrics like average handling time (AHT). They only add more pressure to your agents. Instead, focus on quality, empathy, and first contact resolution (FCR). This would add more value to your agents as well as your customers.

Use Technology Wisely

Cloud contact centers with AI-driven assistants take care of repetitive tasks so agents can focus on solving problems that customers care about.

Train, Upskill, and Recognize

Agents should feel they’re building skills and not just handling tickets. Incentivize agents for learning new skills and offer them micro-bonuses, badges, and public shout-outs for every change they bring about in CSAT scores and NPS scores.

Create a Clear Career Path

Let agents know they can grow to become team leads, quality analysts, business analysts, consultants, product managers, product marketers, trainers, and workforce managers. Also, please provide them with a timeline for these roles and what is expected of them to reach there.

The common refrain in most call centers is that we conduct pizza parties once a month, we give one-time bonuses to top performers, we conduct song and dance events for every festival, and we have catch-all month-end birthday bashes.

What else do we need to do to ensure that our agents stay with us?

Reducing attrition is not about any of these. It is about giving people purpose, progression, and a path.

People, after all, don’t quit jobs; they quit dead-end ones. Your call center job does not have to be a dead-end one.