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Attrition spurs call centres to serenade staff

Savio G Pinto & K Giriprakash in Mumbai

The Indian information technology-enabled services industry has been galloping at a frenetic clip of 70 per cent a year, piggybacking the call centre and business process outsourcing boom.

But the rapid growth has also spawned a throbbing pain for ITES companies: high attrition rates - or employee turnover. The reasons for this are manifold.

Zia Shaikh, chief executive officer, Infowavz, a call centre in Mumbai, says, most of this is because the call centre industry in India has not been able to attract the right kind of employees.

Right kind of employees are those with excellent oral communication skills, an ability to grasp the nuances of different cultures and adapt to them, and the ability to cope with high stress.

"A lack of this has led to a lot of churning," he said.

And with ITES players setting up shop at a rapid pace, employees, too, get an opportunity to jump ship, in a replay of the early days of the dot-com boom.

According to Umesh Mehra of Quality Assurance Institute, Indian operations, attrition rates have doubled to 30-35 per cent - meaning one-third of the employees are always in exit mode - in call centres in India in the past year. There are around 70 call centres in India at present.

QAI globally provides differentiating business process and management solutions to ITES firms so as to help them achieve world-class organisational levels.

"Attrition rate is the highest in Mumbai with employees leaving their jobs for a raise of as little as Rs 500," Mehra says.

Cliff Moore, chairman and co-founder of the US-based Customer Operations Performance Centre, an industry standard for IT-enabled services, says attrition rates are very high in the US, too.

"It's often at 100 per cent, meaning all personnel at a call center could be looking to quit. This is mostly because those who man the call centres and other related jobs in the US are much older - mostly retired people," he said. Boredom sets in pretty fast there.

The demographics, however, are different in India. "Here, ITES employees are in the age group of 21 and 23 years, hence the higher attrition rate. These employees tend to use the money they earn for higher education or to go abroad. Nearly 15-20 per cent of those leave use the money for higher education," Mehra of QAI said.

Accelerating the employee churn is the fact that competition has forced billing rates down in India - with some call centres charging just $7-8 an hour.

This has forced players to rework their human resources schemes and introduce retention incentives. Continuous hiring has been deleterious to many a bottomline.

"We try to create an emotional bond with our employees. It is an effective retention tool," Shaikh of Infowavz said.

Some facilities provided to employees to increase the feel-good factor include a 24-hour cafeteria, well-equipped recreation rooms and games, gymnasiums, cyber cafes and yoga centres, not to mention the regular outings to discotheques.

To avoid such higher employee exodus, ITES firms are happy appeasing their employees.

Monica Doshi, vice-president, Karrox ITES says, "If an agent feels he is part of an important team, he is more likely to have an interest in the success of the call centre and would stay longer. It also has an impact on the way things work and increases the growth prospects of the organisation. Employers must make their employees feel important in the overall scheme of things."

K Vijay Rao, chief executive of Epicentre Technologies, Mumbai, says, "Our approach for employee retention is to build a strong organization and provide employees a career path, which makes their job an excellent career opportunity. By pursuing value-added businesses, we hope to extend the scope of activity for the organisation and thereby for the individuals."

Ashwani Srivastava, president, Global CMS, said, "With career growth being the key issue for most employees, we provide our employees with cross functional exposure and give them an opportunity to work in other areas of the organisation. This scope for growth within the organisation as a whole also works as an effective retention tool."

Infrastructure costs constitutes 75 per cent of setting up a call centres in India, while in the US, the infrastructure cost is a mere 25 per cent, Mehra said.

Additional incentives such as Esops and other long-term benefits also help in keeping the attrition rate low, Srivastava added.

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