Thames Valley University

Employee turnover in call centres

India's call centre industry accounts for a quarter of all software and services exports from the country, according to industry association Nasscom, and Indian call centres employ 160,000 professionals. Daimler-Chrysler, British Telecom, Barclays Bank, HSBC, Honeywell, Aventis, and several others have come to India while the old timers of GE, British Airways, Citigroup, Amex, and others have been around for a decade.1
The size of the Indian BPO market is likely to be around $9-12 billion by 2006 and will employ around 400,000 people, ICRA said in its Indian BPO industry report. According to Nasscom-Mckinsey study, the IT-enabled services sector was due to employ 1.1 million people and earn $1 billion by 2008. That was soon revised to $24 billion.
The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the country which is expected to employ around one million people by 2008 is facing the challenge of finding quality human resources given the current attrition rate of around 50 percent.
The tremendous turnover rate is undeniably one of the main problems faced by the BPO industry globally. HR specialists at the Nasscom 2004 summit brainstormed on various approaches to handle this bugbear- either declare war on attrition and tackle it head on, or adopt a more scientific analytical approach2. At least 60,000 of the 171,000 workforce change jobs every year. About 80% of them look for better leaders. Team leaders want to upgrade to supervisors, quality professionals or operations heads. The HR problem threatens to soon become grave. Good agents are becoming hard to find and with tardy infrastructure, big moves to the much talked about smaller towns will take longer. This means costs will rise making it difficult for small VC-funded companies to survive.

The project, therefore aims at analysing causes of employee turnover.