Economic Revival Spells Spurt In Attrition Rates For Call Centres The Financial Express, May 23, 2002 It’s a war against attrition. Contact centres, already struggling with attrition as high as 30 per cent, are likely to see it zoom to 50 per cent as the economy revives. IT enabled services companies (BPO), however, are devising strategies to stem the potential rise in employee turnover, according to industry experts. “Technical contact centres will be hit by the exodus as soon as the software industry once again takes off in another 6 to 9 months. For at least 3 to 4 months, attrition rates will be as high as 50-60 per cent,” QAI head of BPO Umesh Vyas told eFE. QAI (formerly known as Quality Assurance Institute) provides consultancy and training to software and BPO companies in the areas of human resource, operations and quality improvement. QAI is also working as an implementation partner with Customer Operations Performance Centre, to certify the contact centres in India. According to National Association of Software Services Companies (Nasscom), the present attrition rates within the contact centres in India (30 per cent) is not as high as compared to other countries like Ireland and the US. “The attrition rates within the BPO industry are considerably high in countries like Ireland and the US, going up to over 50 per cent,” Nasscom vice president Sunil Mehta said. Explaining the cause for the fear of high attrition rates in the near future within the industry, Parsec Technologies chief executive officer Prabhat Aggarwal said, “At present, mostly people of higher calibre are being hired for BPO as the jobs within BPO are not yet structured. Once the jobs are well structured, only those people with adequate qualification required for contact centres will be hired, thus pushing up the employee turnover rate.” Parsec Technologies, a contact centre consultancy firm, is handling about 20 international centres with about 2,000 agents and has aggressively been hiring engineers and MBAs. Engineers, hotel management graduates and MBAs comprise around 30 per cent of the total agent strength of contact centre companies like Spectramind and IT&T. IT&T says it is fully aware of the expected rise in attrition rates, to counter which it is offering attractive growth avenues to its agents. “We are offering good pay packages and growth avenues to agents like early promotions from ground level (agents) to the top position as team leaders, which aligns agents with aptitude to the organisation even if they come across tempting offers,” IT&T CEO Hemant Kohli said. Wipro and ChrysCapital-funded Spectramind has about 2,600 agents in both its two centres, each in Delhi and Mumbai. Spectramind is also adopting the same strategy as IT&T, of giving incentives to its agents. “Attrition is bound to happen and we expect that there will a be movement of engineers from call centres to other verticals in the next 9 months as the economy recovers,” the company’s vice president - human resources Varadaranjan S said. According to QAI and Nasscom, contact centres should increase their focus on training and multi-skilling of agents as well as providing adequate incentives. Back