Call centres seen 15% over-staffed

The call centre sector in India is currently overstaffed by around 15 per cent, calling for an immediate reduction in workforce to bring overheads to a realistic level. This is over and above the 40 per cent attrition rate that most of the companies face.

“According to our data, the call centre sector in India is about 15 per cent excess staffed. This is mainly due to the improper planning of staffing of the floor,” said Umesh Vyas, consulting partner, QAI India, a firm that assists Indian call centre companies achieve global standards.

One of the biggest problem that the Indian call centre companies face is the inability to predict call traffic and as a result of this the companies tend to hire more agents.

“The companies are not able to predict the call traffic and deploy agents accordingly. The staffing at the floor and scheduling is a major problem that the companies are dealing with now,” he said.

He pointed out the high attrition rate as the main reasons for high rate of hiring seen in the sector.

Besides, the companies are also finding it difficult to plan the call handling shifts, which leads to over hiring and deploying people more than required.

Another problem call centres are dealing with is their highly qualified agents. Most of the agents handle jobs, which does not require such high level of sophistication.

“With over qualified people handling jobs that do not require high levels of sophistication, it leads to agents losing interest. Besides, it also leads to higher levels of absenteeism,” Vyas said.

According to QAI's analysis, the Indian call centre companies see a very high level of absence of agents.

“The companies need to come out with innovative methods to handle this,” he pointed out.

According to Vyas, one of the major problems that the call centre sector faces at the moment is the lack of highly qualified middle management and team leaders.

“We have very high quality top management, which is comparable with anywhere in the world or better than the rest of the world. The industry also has highly qualified world class agents. But it lacks high quality middle management team,” he said.

“The main reason behind this is the nascent stage that the industry is now. Most of the companies are dealing with a situation where they are promoting agents with six months of experience as team leaders. But they do not normally have the experience to be team leaders,” he said.