KEEPING GREAT AGENTS
OPERATING ARCHIVE · 2013–2026
Why good call centre agents really leave. It is rarely the money.
Call centre staff turnover is not mainly about pay. Good agents leave when they lose their confidence. Here is how we keep ours for years.
How does a call centre agent build a skill that takes years, if they only last six months in each centre? That is the real question.
It is not the extra euro
Most people think agents leave because someone down the road offered them slightly more money. Mostly that is not true.
They leave because they have lost their mojo. Sometimes they are embarrassed. They went from being one of the best on the floor to the bottom of the board, and good agents do not like that. The ones with pride in themselves are exactly the ones who walk. So you lose the people you most wanted to keep.
Asking for money, asking for time
That is why we have three kinds of work: fundraising, business market research and consumer market research.
The two hardest are fundraising and business research, and you have to sound completely sure of yourself in both. In fundraising you are asking people for money. That is the difficult part, but a charity that does not ask for money will not exist for long. In a business survey you are asking a managing director for their time, which they value just as much.
It is really the same skill. One asks for money and one asks for time. And on both, confidence can go very quickly, and the person on the other end can hear it the second it does.
More than one string to your bow
So you need somewhere to send a great agent for a break. Not because they cannot do the hard work, but because they are trying too hard at it.
That is why we also run a lot of consumer research, simple tax paperwork calls for charities and welcome calls. One week out of the firing line and they are usually ready to go again.
You hold your best agents by noticing when they are struggling and moving them quietly, without making an issue of it.
Some voices just do not fit some causes
It is amazing how some of the best agents cannot do certain campaigns at all. Someone can be one of the best fundraisers in the country, hit one particular charity, and their voice just does not work on it. Nobody is at fault. You move them and they are brilliant again somewhere else.
Long story short
To keep your best agents you have to be able to give them different work. A centre with one kind of campaign has nowhere to put a good person on a bad week, so it loses them.
I also wonder whether this is a much wider problem than call centres. Plenty of jobs have one hard task and nothing to step back to.