Call centres adjust approaches to finding, keeping, and paying workers

Citation

(2003), "Call centres adjust approaches to finding, keeping, and paying workers", Career Development International, Vol. 8 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi.2003.13708dab.001

Call centres adjust approaches to finding, keeping, and paying workers

Call centres adjust approaches to finding, keeping, and paying workers

With call centres becoming a more established part of the US business scene, call-centre operators are fine-tuning their approaches to finding, keeping, and rewarding their employees, a new survey finds.

The Call-Centre Compensation Survey, conducted by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, reflects the growing interest in call centres as a way to handle a range of business functions, including sales, customer service, technical support and credit.

Some 329 organizations – representing 327,050 employees in 1,541 call centres across the USA – provided data on 86 different call-centre jobs. In addition, about 40 of the survey participants attended a conference in Denver, Colorado, to discuss in more detail their concerns and challenges around people programmes and policies.

According to Dana Kraml, a Mercer reward consultant with extensive experience in call-centre issues, call-centre operators face a number of critical challenges:

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  Turnover. Because of perennially high staff turnover at call centres, employee attraction and retention are critical issues requiring continual attention. Call-centre operators say their biggest recruiting barrier is a lack of qualified candidates. The recruitment techniques they find most effective are employee referrals, local newspaper’advertisements and job fairs. The retention techniques judged most effective are recognition programmes, a favourable work environment and high quality’supervision and leadership. Employers at the conference discussed new and creative ways to reduce turnover. Their ideas ranged from adding employee-friendly benefits, such as concierge services to help employees who often work non-traditional hours, to providing job previews to give potential employees a realistic view of a "day in the life" of a call-centre employee.

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  Base and variable pay mix. As front-line call-centre jobs become more focused on sales, employers are struggling to find the optimum balance between base and variable pay. "Increasingly, call-centre employees are asked to sell up and turn a basic inquiry into a bigger opportunity," said Dana Kraml. "Employers must determine how to motivate employees to pursue these additional selling opportunities, as well as how to track results. This is leading to increasingly sophisticated incentive-pay programmes and tracking systems." According to the survey, variable pay – which can include bonuses, commissions, and other incentives – is most often based on achievement of individual objectives, followed by level of service provided and achievement of department and team objectives. Employers try to grant pay increases in a way that motivates and retains employees. A call-centre employee may receive a smaller pay increase two times a year (for example, at the completion of an initial training or probationary period, then again as part of the normal, annual review cycle) instead of one larger pay increase once a year.

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  Paying for 24/7 work. Call-centre reward programmes must reflect the fact that most centres are open seven days a week and, in many cases, 24 hours a day. The survey indicates that call centres are open a median 364 days a year. Some 70 per cent of survey respondents address this need through the use of shift differentials. The challenge for employers, Dana Kraml notes, is how to define the shifts and how to track pay for employees whose schedules straddle two shifts or who rotate between different shifts.

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  •Multilingual employees. According to the survey, 41 per cent of call centres pay a premium for employees who are multilingual. Such language skills are needed to serve an increasingly diverse customer base. The language most in demand by employers is Spanish. According to Dana Kraml, because call-centre business increasingly is conducted over the Internet, in addition to the telephone, call centres typically look for proficiency in both speaking and writing before they will classify an employee as bilingual and pay a premium for that language skill.

The survey also looks at pay levels and trends for 86 call-centre jobs. For each job, the survey contains statistical summaries for base salary, short-term incentive, total cash compensation (base salary plus short-term incentive), salary ranges and short and long-term incentive eligibility.

The highest-paid jobs in the call-centre environment include:

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  top corporate call-centre executive, with median total cash compensation (includes base salary and annual incentive) of $191,400;

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  group or regional call-centre executive, at $134,100; and

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  call-centre executive (responsible for a single call centre or business segment) at $108,600.

The survey reveals differences in pay by call-centre type or function. For example, pay for intermediate-level representatives tends to be highest in call centres focused on full account management, the Internet and credit/collections. Pay is lowest for the categories of inbound-with-selling, outbound-with-selling, and inbound order entry. Among team and group managers, however, different patterns emerge. Pay is highest for the outbound-with-selling category, followed by credit/collections and customer service, and lowest for inbound order entry.