Cracking the Retention Code: Why Do Call Centers Have High Turnover Rates?

Most call center managers are laser-focused on meeting KPI metrics relating to customer experience. However, the employee experience is equally important, especially given that the call center industry is renowned for its high turnover rate.

In this article, we’ll explore the most common causes of high call center turnover and some strategies for greater employee retention.

Defining Employee Turnover Rate

A company’s employee turnover is the rate at which its workers voluntarily leave their jobs over a given period.

It’s pretty simple to calculate your organization’s turnover as a percentage. Divide the number of separations over a given period by the average number of workers and multiply that figure by 100.

Today, modern HR software tools can automatically analyze your company’s turnover trends by month, year, or quarter. They can also report turnover by factors such as age, ethnicity, and gender.

Average Turnover Rate for Call Centers in 2024

The average turnover rate in call centers is currently 30-45% per year.

Why is this figure so high? Let’s explore.

Why Do Call Centers Have High Turnover Rates?

Pressure to Perform

Call centers are fast-paced environments. Agents are under constant pressure to adhere to call time standards, resolution rates, customer satisfaction scores, and upsell targets, all while dealing with challenging customer problems. This relentless pressure can strain agents’ mental health and lead to burnout.

Inadequate Compensation

As of March 2024, the average hourly pay for call center agents in the US is just $17.75 per hour, which amounts to a total yearly salary of about $38,000 for full-timers. Given the stress agents endure, these relatively low pay rates may make employees seek jobs elsewhere.

Long Hours

Call centers are typically staffed during the evenings, weekends, and holidays. Agents who work non-standard shifts may feel their jobs prevent them from maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Lack of Career Progression

If agents feel there’s little or no opportunity to advance into a higher-paying supervisory or management role, they can quickly become demotivated and look elsewhere for a better career path.

What’s the Impact of High Call Center Turnover Rates?

When one agent leaves, it adds to the stress and workload of other agents in the team. And if your call center becomes understaffed due to high turnover levels, your customers will be subjected to longer wait times. This can have significant direct and indirect costs.

For example, if your 4,000 call/day center has just 1% of calls abandoned by customers due to long waits, that’s 40 lost calls every day. If each of your customers has a lifetime value of $500, those abandoned calls represent $20,000 in lost revenue per day!

Other tangible turnover costs include:

• Overtime pay for remaining agents as you try to fill the gap.
• The cost of recruiting, hiring, and training new agents.
• Additional supervision for new hires.

Strategies to Reduce Turnover Rates in Call Centers

Let’s consider ways you can reduce your call center’s staff attrition rate and foster a positive working environment.

Hire People with the Right Skills and Experience

The worst thing you can do is hire agents who lack the relevant abilities and expertise to perform their roles and handle the job’s demands. During job interviews, be sure to ask in-depth questions about applicants’ capabilities and prior work experience. Also, make sure your job descriptions are comprehensive and accurate.

Manage Expectations

Be honest with interviewees if the role they’re applying for lacks any realistic potential for career progression. This transparency will reduce the number of workers who leave because they’ve become disillusioned about their long-term prospects with your organization.

Conduct Thorough Training and Onboarding

In your haste to get your agents taking customer calls, don’t neglect the importance of running a comprehensive onboarding and training program. This is vital for ensuring agents gain confidence in their skills and ability to serve customers with excellence. Your training should include your products, call center technologies, best practices, and escalation protocols.

Cultivate a Positive Work Environment

To foster a positive work environment, ensure your workplace is clean, safe, and comfortable. Schedule regular work breaks and supply snacks and refreshments where possible. Take a zero-tolerance stance on any form of abusive, discriminatory, or other toxic behaviors like bullying or harassment.

Offer Competitive Benefits

If your agents are worried about how they’re going to pay for medical care or feed their families while they wait for payday, they’ll likely be distracted. They may even start looking elsewhere for a better employment opportunity. To avoid this, consider offering health insurance and a financial wellness program. Your financial wellness program should ideally include Earned Wage Access (EWA)¹ to reduce the stress of being short of cash between paychecks.

Provide Flexibility

Employees in every sector value flexibility. So, consider supporting a combination of remote work and on-site options for your call center agents based on their individual needs and preferences. You might also give employees the ability to swap shifts quickly using a handy employee communication app. This is an easy and practical way to help them remain loyal.

Invest in Modern Call Center Technologies

Forward-looking call center managers are investing in digital technologies to reduce complexity and ease the pressure on agents.  For example:

• The best customer service CRMs will automatically supply customer account details, so your agents immediately have full context when taking customer calls.
• AI-powered chatbots can provide first-line customer support before handing calls off to human agents when required.
• Skills-based routing technology matches inquiries to agents with the most appropriate knowledge and skills. This ensures your agents only take calls they can confidently and competently handle.

Incentivize Loyalty

Another effective retention technique is to align agents’ compensation with their achievements. To incentivize loyalty and higher agent performance, consider implementing the following:

• Setting clear individual or team performance goals (such as call resolution times and good customer satisfaction ratings) and tying these to rewards or bonuses.
• Establishing leaderboards to encourage friendly competition.

Ask for Feedback

Encourage your agents to be open about giving you feedback about what they like and don’t like about their jobs. This will allow you to identify and rectify minor issues before they become major problems. It also sends a signal to your employees that you value them and are prepared to invest in improving their job satisfaction.

Conduct Exit Interviews

It’s impossible to fix problems if you don’t know what happened and why. Exit interviews give you valuable insights from departing team members about problems impacting your staff retention rate. They also allow you to identify areas for improvement and prioritize programs or interventions such as management training or incentives.

Successful Call Center Turnover Reduction in Action

InfoCision is an award-winning leader in providing customer care services in diverse industries. Faced with rising costs in a high-turnover industry, InfoCision realized the need to change its approach to employee benefits. Acknowledging the tangible impact of employee financial stress on engagement and productivity, InfoCision began searching for solutions focused on employee financial wellness.

“We really saw the need to provide our employee base with a way to allow them to access their wages on demand. So many times an unexpected expense happens whereby employees need money immediately rather than waiting until payday,” says Alwynn Mellen, Director of Employee Engagement, InfoCision.

Using Payactiv, InfoCision found a means to bridge the gap between employee financial needs and payday. Providing InfoCision’s employees with on-demand access to earned wages proved overwhelmingly popular; InfoCision employees have accessed around $700,000 in earned wages in under a year. Both salaried and hourly workers are making use of Payactiv’s platform.

InfoCision found that the ability to advertise on-demand pay was vital for recruiting and retaining top talent. The flexibility of the Payactiv platform benefited both hourly and salaried workers. According to Terri Privett, Senior Director of Accounting Administration at InfoCision, “Using Payactiv can help keep people in the workforce and engaged with their jobs.”

Read the full case study.

Tackling Turnover with Payactiv

Reducing your call center’s turnover rate won’t happen overnight, but with the right benefits, technologies, processes, and tools, you can bring it down to a manageable level.

Are you ready to start engaging and rewarding your agents and creating a more loyal team?

Payactiv partners with businesses to help their employees fully engage in both work and life and remain loyal and happy in their workplace. Our all-in-one Livelihood benefits platform takes a holistic approach to improving financial wellness and increasing worker satisfaction.

Learn more about Payactiv’s Service, or book your demo now.

¹Earned Wage Access requires employer participation. Employees can only access a portion of the wages they have earned to date.

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