Staff turnover at many of the UK's call centres could be significantly higher than official figures suggest. Researcher Dr George Callaghan of The Open University, Edinburgh, believes that the official average of 20 per cent staff turnover is somewhat wide of the true mark. Dr Callaghan's in-depth survey of Scottish-based telephone banking call centres suggests that staff turnover can rise as high as 80 per cent. "Such high turnover presents a two fold problem," he claims. Firstly, the costs of recruitment and training are very high. Secondly, in Scotland at least, the pool of available labour to work in established call centres is now shrinking.
Call centre operations could do more to retain existing staff, he argues. One obvious problem is the mismatch between the skills and attributes required of recruits and the opportunities, once employed, to utilise those characteristics and behaviours. "Increasingly, call centres demand staff to be customer focused and capable of delivering a quality customer service," he explains. Once employed, however, most call centre staff find that it is the quantity of calls answered, rather than the quality of service they provide, which counts. While managers insist that customer satisfaction is important, most performance metrics are measures of the number of calls taken and the speed with which calls are handled. "This is one white collar environment where employee performance is measured by the second," he claims. "Many employees expressed extreme frustration with their jobs. They were under the impression they were employed for their great people skills, but then not allowed to use those skills." At present, call centre staff stay for only 18 months. "Interestingly, when pressed, many managers say people leave because 'the job is not for them' - the assumption being that there is something wrong with the worker not the work," explains Dr Callaghan.
This assumption leads many organisations to believe that improving recruitment processes is the answer, ie to ensure the person is 'right' for the work. Addressing working conditions and the stresses of call centre work may, he suggests, be equally pertinent. Unionised call centres, for example, are far more likely to have regular staff breaks and access to physiotherapists than non-unionised operations. Moreover, addressing the 'content' of work and providing call centre staff with more fulfilling jobs may also stem turnover. In banking call centres, for example, parts of the banking process could be automated and, with further training, call centre staff could deal with a far wider range of enquiries than permitted at present. Certainly, expecting trained and capable staff to delight in narrow, routine tasks appears exceptionally hopeful over the longer term.