By Albert D. Castro

The high attrition rate among workers in call centers endanger its growth potential.

Call Centres.net Pty. Ltd. in its "Contact Center Benchmarking Report" said the industry must work to retain its employees to achieve its goal of 23 percent growth this year.

A survey done by Call Centres.net showed that the lack of career path, proper remuneration, interesting work to do, and flexibility of work condition are causing workers to leave their jobs.

Call Center.net managing director Catriona Wallace said that "on the average, full-time agents leave their work after working for only 22 months; part-times agents for 6 six months; team leaders at over 3 years; and center managers after almost 6 years."

Of those who leave a contact center work, about 51 percent totally leave the industry to look for opportunities in other sectors. The remaining 49 percent seeks jobs in other call center companies.

"(Agents) don’t see this as a serious career. They believe that the work is mundane and not stimulating enough," said Wallace.

Don Lee, director of Asia Pacific, Autonomy talk, global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise expressed the need for call center companies to keep their current pool of employees saying "high levels of employee turnover can have a devastating effect on all aspects of customer service, disrupting operations and decreasing customer satisfaction, as well as increased costs for new hire training."

"With such a high competitive outsourcing market in the region and increasing expectations of customer service, organizations need to pay particular interest to the career development and continuity of their agents," he said.

The benchmarking report meanwhile said that the Asian call center industry is "in a period of transition" from providing traditional service and support to being a service and sales or revenue generation focused entity — profit centers.

Asia, particularly the Philippines is an important hub for the industry citing that 82 percent of all customer contacts in the country are handled by contact centers.

Currently, about 72 percent of Philippine contact centers are have already transformed their business into profit centers, according to the report.

A total of 124 contact centers firms are currently operating in the Philippines, with a total of 105,000 seats.