Salary study: do your wages match up?

What are the best- and worst-paid locations for inbound contact centres across the UK? Here, Sarah Allen provides some key figures on the state of UK inbound pay rates and offers up some advice on how to go about benchmarking your contact centre.

What I find strange about UK contact centres is the way they understand the dangers in comparing UK and offshore HR data together very well, but don’t use the same level of care when comparing themselves against domestic benchmarks.No self-respecting travel call centre handling inbound calls from Manchester, with great staff travel incentives and low attrition, is going to compare themselves to a cold-calling outbound telesales outsourcer in the utility business calling UK customers from Chenai, India.

Regional best and worst
Let’s start with the best and worst paying regions…

From my point of view, this shows us that there is a very mixed labour market within the UK. There is a strong mix between high and low ratings across the regions, reflecting the changing installed base. For example, we continue to see the position of the South East of England as generally paying the highest salaries in agent, team leader and supervisor roles. Meanwhile, the highest paid contact centre managers are actually in the South West of England.

Inbound team leaders
We can see from the table below that, after the South-East, the South-West and East Midlands pay the most for team leaders, with Scotland and the North-East paying the lowest salaries.

Inbound supervisor
The national mean average for inbound supervisors is 26,250 per annum. It does not surprise me to find that the South-East is nearly 4,000 above the next highest location, with Scotland pulling the national mean figure up quite markedly as the table below shows.

Inbound contact centre managers
Moving on to the more senior roles, the average pay for an inbound contact centre manager is currently 38,975 per annum before bonuses. The range of pay in this role is very broad as the table below shows, with Northern Ireland again tagging behind at almost 12,000 below this figure. It may be surprising to see South-West managers at the top of the table, but Mitial has previously reported this phenomenon.

Inbound director of operations
If I now ask you to look at ‘inbound directors of operations’, we see London and the South-East at the top of the table. However, interestingly, the national average is just 4,500 lower. Only Wales and Northern Ireland sit well off the mark.

Inbound agents
Now let’s look at inbound agents’ average pay. From the chart below you’ll see that the lowest paid inbound agents are in Northern Ireland, but the gap between Northern Ireland and other locations has definitely narrowed, reflecting the strengthening value-add proposition from Northern Ireland.
The highest paid agents are meanwhile based in the South-East, Greater London, North-West England and Scotland.

Final thoughts
So, what does this all show us? Inevitably, it tells us that the generally accepted views on expensive and less expensive places to operate has really become obsolete. The pattern is far more mixed than we imagined, and this has to be considered more carefully than ever before.

Benchmarking
Most UK contact centres will happily compare themselves to neighbouring call centres in their own city, even though these neighbours may be in different verticals, perform completely different types of work, and may even have different call-flow directions.

If we bring in variations between public and private sector, profits and charities and in-house and outsourcers, we can really see the dangers in this type of HR benchmarking.

How, then, do you ensure you get a fair idea of how much you should be paying and rewarding inbound call centre staff in your sector and location?

My advice is, where possible, to look at centres in your own sector and in close proximity to you. The following data splits – or filters – should help you hone things down:

By using filters, you can search and create a profile that is far closer to your own type of business. It also allows you to be more selective in scrutinising benchmarks based on knowing how the filter is generated.

But enough on the background information. I suspect you’re eager to find out just what you should be paying – or should be being paid – if you’re in an inbound call centre here in the UK.

While it would be impossible to provide a breakdown to the depth of filter I’ve suggested above, what we’ve been able to do here is to evaluate average (mean) basic salaries in different regions.

Sarah Allen is research director at analyst house Mitial
Tel: +44 8707 60 70 90
Website: www.mitial.com

Mitial Research – in partnership with the Call Centre Management Association and Local Authority Contact Centre Benchmarking Group – has recently completed a comprehensive study on UK salary and rewards. The study was part of a ramp-up towards an interactive salary and rewards benchmark service now being offered commercially by Mitial.

To read the latest 2012 salary survey results, please click here.

Author: Jonty Pearce