I don’t remember at the age of 14 choosing my studies because I wanted to work in a Contact Centre. I, like the majority, fell into the industry by accident, starting out as an agent because I needed money between jobs within my chosen profession at the time.

Perhaps we should take a reality check and look closely at the profiles of those who do join a Contact Centre, and look to create actions that suit the varying Contact Centre employees and what they want to get out of the experience.

There are the ‘Travellers’ – joining a Contact Centre for a variety of reasons; travelling the world, between jobs, returning to work, just graduating, needing part-time work,getting back into the work ethic, awaiting an upturn in their chosen industry. These are not likely to stay long – so perhaps we could accept this and focus on getting them to stay 9 months instead of 3 – a huge increase.

There are those who want to work in a Contact Centre, who love the telephone interaction and these are gems. Again we throw progression planning at them when many simply want to stay on the phone – so surely we need to develop them in role, searching out enhanced interaction training, improved vocal training, greater inter-personal skills training, use of NLP and so on – to get this group to want to stay in role, and longer.

Then there are the ‘Opportunists’, who either have come from the previous 2 pools mentioned above or know a little bit about Contact Centres and see an opportunity for progression. These are our future talent, cross-roles and cross-levels, and should be identified from their very start and progressed and developed.

Understanding our people to understand how to retain them and acting upon it, is more likely to have an effect upon retention. Factoring this into annual stats and reporting too will affect a better understanding of attrition and give a truer picture of why and what to do.

Be honest – not everyone joined a Contact Centre for life.

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What this article doesn’t mention is the need for churn.

I recently worked for Hoseasons Holidays in Lowestoft running their 100 seat call centre. All of their call centre team had a minimum of one year’s service with most in excess of five and some in excess of 20 years. The only leavers were those that had hit their retirement age; no one was leaving to pursue a high powered career in Norwich or London or similar.

The point I’m getting at is that after a period of time, people become stagnant and will do the bare minimum to get by; they can avoid action plans and will remain in employment by the skin of their teeth.

Many of you will say that you would look at incentives, forums, meetings, training programmes and so on but if the rot has set in, with the employment laws that are in place today, it is difficult to do anything quickly. Over a lengthy period it would be no problem, but what businesses do you know that have a long time to change a culture and make money?

Churn enables new people to come through the doors and gives the talent spotters the opportunity to grow people into different roles, including management. I find new people spur those on that are still with you and increases the competitiveness, enhances efficiencies and ultimately improves profitability.

So whilst reducing attrition is good, please don’t eradicate it.