Your opinion: Travel costs and lack of parking spaces
Is call centre attrition being driven by high fuel prices and a lack of car parking places?
While the price of petrol has started to fall back over the last couple of weeks, travel costs could become a major issue for many contact centres. According to the recent Sabio/YouGov survey over a quarter of call centre workers who drive to work spend one hour a day or longer on their commute.
According to my rough calculations the average salary for an inbound call centre agent is £15,458 which amounts to just £6.33 per hour after tax and deductions. A typical car could use around £5 of petrol in an hour.
This means that for many people their first hour’s salary is spent just repaying the cost of the petrol to get to work.
Parking spaces
And it does not stop there. We know from most of our site visits that car parking spaces at city centre or out-of-town call centres are often difficult to find.
So how long before we find that one factor in agent attrition is just getting to work?
What do you think?
Do you spend a small fortune getting to work? Do you find a lack of parking spaces a problem? Or maybe you have solved the problem by taking the bus, or walking to work?
Leave your comments in the box below.
Tweet20 Aug 2008
Filed under Call Centre News
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Comments on: Your opinion: Travel costs and lack of parking spaces
——Price of fuel was a key driver when deciding to seek employment closer to home——
When I first started commuting to work seven years ago, the cost of fuel wasn’t a concern. At about 80 pence per litre of diesel the cost was manageable (although not quite what I remember when I first started driving in 1990).
I used to commute 120 miles, then 140 miles and more recently 100 miles (round trip) each day.
My current job doesn’t require a commute anymore as I work just a few minutes from home. This fact was a key driver when deciding to leave my previous employment and secure a new position closer to home.
Previously I had moved jobs for a new challenge and increased salary but in the end it turned into a false economy as the salary may have been increased but more time was taken up commuting and more salary was burnt on paying for a car and fuelling it.
My commute was anything between 90-120 minutes each way, the cost of fuel was around £300 per month and the lease cost on a VW Golf Diesel was £270 per month.
So my jobs that were between 50 and 70 miles away from home that had varying attractive salary, benefits, etc. were at times costing me 20 hours a week in travelling due to daily without fail congestion on the A12 and approximately £10k a year was coming out of my salary for fuel and vehicle costs.
So my solution has been to secure a position setting up a call centre for a motor trader in my home town at a lesser salary than when working in London, but with more time for my family and enough reduced travelling costs to be better off each month.
Posted by Darren Degiorgio — 21 Aug 2008 @ 11:42 am
Darren
it sounds like you have got things sorted.
It could be that car pooling could be an answer to these problems.
I visited San Jose, California many years ago and the state government was really pushing it. I met quite a number of people who shared cars to get to work.
This could be something reasonably easy to set up by just posting a couple of notices on the notice board or on the intranet bulletin board. It could be two headings – “lifts offered” and “lifts wanted”.
Posted by James Potcullis — 22 Aug 2008 @ 8:41 am
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