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Call centre agents don't desert the companies they work with; they simply leave the bad supervisors! This theory of Oscar Alban, the patriarch of the global call center industry, could help in discovering a formula to contain the attrition rates in Indian call centers. 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. 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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