Alban: Work from home - cure for India's call center attrition
Oscar Alban, patriarch of the call center industry has presented a solution to the escalating attrition rates in Indian call centers: ‘home agent culture’. This ironically, is taken from the American model of allowing employees to do their work in the comfort of their homes.
Alban sees the home agent culture a possible answer to the call center and customer service outsourcing industry’s attrition rate, which shoots up as much as 50%. This high a mortality rate can be attributed mostly to the ungodly working hours – the wee hours of the morning which is the business hours for the western, developed countries.
He adds, “This creates a tremendous stress on the workforce, apart from contributing to the attrition issues. There should be plans to ease this burden, like initiating employee-assistance programs that can help them deal with the change. There could be counselors.”
The problem should not be addressed merely on the office front – even schools and universities should throw in their participation in providing training for handling call centers and their agents. Not only does this assure quality agents, but a quality life for the agents themselves.
Alban shared a few tips on improving the Indian call center industry such as creating good frontline supervisors, balancing quality and quantity of services, managing agent schedules, mapping out their career paths, and fostering a strong sense of leadership among those qualified. He furthers, “It is going to be important to put training initiatives in place. Call centers that have strong on-going training program and have developed agent career path initiatives have seen a tremendous decrease in agent attrition.”
“Supervisors form the youngest managerial levels in call centres and are usually pressured to deliver numbers, which might not be the wisest way to operate. The balance between the quantity and quality of delivery needs to be clearly defined for them,” he says.
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