Attrition in the Contact Center: Why is it Such a Problem?

If you work in the contact center industry, you know that one of the biggest and most persistent challenges is attrition. But what exactly is attrition, and why is it such a serious issue?

What is it?

To be clear, attrition refers to the rate at which employees leave a company, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and must be replaced. In the contact center world, this is often a revolving door problem—agents are hired, trained, and then leave, often within months, weeks, or even days.

The Scope of the Problem

Contact centers have some of the highest attrition rates of any industry. Studies suggest that annual agent attrition rates range between 30% and 45%, with some centers seeing numbers even higher. In extreme cases, some contact centers experience 100% turnover annually, replacing their entire workforce each year. Compare that to the national average across all industries, which hovers around 12-15%, and it’s clear that contact centers have a unique and expensive problem.

The Cost of Attrition

The financial impact of attrition is staggering. According to industry research, the cost of replacing a single agent can range from $5,000 to $10,000, factoring in recruitment, training, onboarding, and lost productivity. With all these agents leaving their jobs each year, attrition costs the contact center industry around $18 billion annually.

Then you can add in the ripple-effect costs: lower customer satisfaction, increased stress on remaining staff, and wasted hours of training on agents who quit before they answer their first chat or call.

Why Do Contact Centers Have Such High Attrition?

While every employee has personal reasons for leaving a job, several recurring factors contribute to high turnover in the contact center industry:

  • High Pressure, High Stress – Handling customer complaints all day can take a toll. Time was when agents could count on a ratio of three easy calls for every one difficult one, giving them time to decompress with a few “I forgot my password” calls. Now with AI and chatbots handling so many of the easy calls, it’s one easy call for every three hard ones. Or maybe no easy calls at all.
  • Insufficient Pay – Many contact center jobs can offer only so much for entry-level wages; many agents will feel that their pay doesn’t reflect the stress of the job and the expertise required to give good customer service.
  • Inflexible Scheduling – Many agents struggle with rigid shifts that make it difficult to balance personal life and responsibilities. Their center may have no workforce management system to automate schedule flexibility, or perhaps they do have a tool, but changing the way things work is a huge challenge in itself.
  • Poor Work/Life Balance – Newer agents may feel that they’ll never survive long enough to get the “good” schedules—leading to missed time with their kids. Every doctor’s appointment can turn into a major scheduling headache, which makes them think about finding a job elsewhere.

The Ripple Effects of Attrition

Agent attrition doesn’t just impact the bottom line—it affects everything in a contact center.

  • Employee Morale – When coworkers constantly come and go, it disrupts team cohesion and makes it difficult to build a strong, collaborative culture. Team Leads feel that they invest time in coaching employees only to see no benefit from their hard work.
  • WFM Upheaval – The WFM Team knows only too well how challenging it is to forecast and schedule under the best of circumstances. Burned out agents calling in sick or quitting leaves holes in the schedule that the WFM team must scramble to fill.
  • Customer Satisfaction – High turnover means fewer experienced agents handling calls, leading to longer resolution times, more errors, and decreased customer confidence.

AI: A Solution or a Supplement?

With AI-driven automation on the rise, you might wonder if all this worry about attrition will just go away. But AI still has yet to replicate human empathy, warmth, and creative problem-solving skills—three essential traits for high-quality customer interactions. Rather than replacing human agents, AI should be used to enhance their roles, reducing repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on meaningful, complex interactions. This makes retaining skilled, experienced agents more important than ever.

 

Hope for the Future

The good news? Attrition isn’t an unbeatable challenge. While it remains a serious problem, innovative companies are finding new ways to improve retention, often leveraging AI to support human agents rather than replacing them.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our attrition series, where we’ll dive into calcualting attrition and creating practical strategies for reducing turnover and improving agent retention. Follow Corvoca’s blog and social media channels for updates—because solving the attrition challenge starts with understanding it.