The Times (Shreveport, Louisiana), July 31, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The Times (Shreveport, LA)
All Rights Reserved
The Times (Shreveport, Louisiana)

July 31, 2005 Sunday

HEADLINE: Survey finds high turnover 'a vicious cycle' for call centers

BYLINE: Melody Brumble, mbrumble@gannett.com

BODY:
By Melody Brumble
U.S. Support Co. and its workers represent almost every statistic a team of Cornell University professors found in a national study of call centers in 2004.
Rose Batt and her colleagues, Virginia Doellgast and Hyunji Kwon, surveyed managers at 472 call centers about human resources practices, performance and business strategies. Outsource call centers account for 14 percent of those in the study.
Along the way, Batt, Doellgast and Kwon found that call center workers are older and better educated. That's despite a perception that the employees are younger and without much attachment to the work force.
They could be talking about Penny Page, 58, and Terrance Chambers, 39. Both had retail customer service experience before starting work at U.S. Support. Both ran into the company's strict expectations about productivity and inflexible attitude toward independent thought. Page lasted about six weeks, Chambers about six months.
"You just can't make a wave. Just be invisible," Page said. "It was my worst employment experience ever."
Chambers believes U.S. Support targeted him for firing because he spoke out about a critical e-mail from quality control to employees. The message came after the company decreased the call handling time from seven minutes to four minutes on one account.
"I had suggestions about increasing employee morale and asked them to look at the handle time," Chambers said. "I got back a pretty scathing e-mail that was copied to all the managers at U.S. Support."
Batt is the Alice H. Cook professor of women and work at Cornell's Industrial and Labor Relations School. She and colleagues are working on a long-term study of the U.S. call center industry.
Because of her research, she's familiar with the focus on productivity that dominates many call centers.
The study notes that call center workers generally have little discretion over daily tasks and the pace of work.
But that kind of approach can lead to poor customer service, which affects a call center's business, Batt said.
That's especially true of outsource call centers like U.S. Support, which contracts with companies to provide customer service.
"The centers that perform best are the ones that focus on customer service quality and overall revenue generation as opposed to focusing on minimizing cost and such metrics as the average call handling time," Batt said.
More successful call centers take time to actually address customer needs, she said. They also let workers take the lead in handling some problems instead of locking them into a cookie-cutter approach.
Empowering employees to make some decisions also reduces turnover. Firings, layoffs, retirements and dismissals can lead to an outsource call center replacing up to 51 percent of its work force every year.
The attrition rate may be even higher at U.S. Support. Page estimates that only 45 of 200 people hired when she was at the company were still there when she was fired.
She and other employees recalled that a particular training room seemed to be the "firing room," where managers called groups of people targeted for termination.
Chambers said seven of 69 people in his training class were still there when he was fired. "They tend to hire families, but they also tend to fire families together."
Outsource call centers like U.S. Support included in the national study had almost two times as many dismissals and layoffs as in-house call centers. In-house centers are operated by the company for which they provide support. An example would be the BellSouth small business sales call center in Shreveport.
Batt and colleagues are studying dismissal patterns at call centers. She speculates that firing and dismissal rates are tied to "the very rigid work environment, where the company demands high levels of handling calls, low discretion, kind of this production line idea."
High turnover causes "a vicious cycle" for companies, no matter what the cause. That's because it takes three to six months for someone to become proficient at the work, Batt said.
"With call centers that don't even pay a living wage or don't provide benefits or health care, people think, 'Why should I even stay with this employer?'" Batt said. "What that means is the company is in a treadmill. Every time they get someone trained and about ready to do the job, they're out the door."
Turnover at centers where workers belong to a union is lower than at nonunion centers, the study found. That translates into a more stable and experienced work force, according to the study. The report found absenteeism rates run about the same at union and nonunion centers.
"We strongly advocate that a company makes money," said Dugg Harrison, president of Communications Workers of America Local 1134 in Shreveport.
"We'll go and encourage the employees to work safely, to work smart. We encourage them to have good attendance. We know the company's got to make money for us to make money."
In Shreveport, only two call centers, BellSouth's small business sales and national directory information units, have union representation. Communications Workers of America represents about 425 people in the area. That group includes service and repair technicians, Harrison said.
"We have had people who worked out at U.S. Support come to work for us. They have heavily enlightened us as to the conditions out there," Harrison said.
"One of the things that I've heard is that they're promised up front a certain wage per hour. Once they get in there, that wage is only guaranteed while they are actually talking to a customer. That's very deceptive."
Harrison said he's also heard negative things about pay differences and practices at the CenturyTel call center. In the past, CenturyTel workers approached CWA about holding a union vote. The vote never occurred.
U.S. Support employees haven't approached the union about a vote, he said. "I don't want to go anywhere we're not welcome."
By the numbers
A nationwide call center study in 2004 includes the following information about outsource call centers like U.S. Support Co.
51 percent: average turnover.
27.8 percent: average quit rate.
10 percent: absenteeism.
$25,529: typical worker pay.
$49,884: typical manager pay.
2.4 weeks: average amount of training.

GRAPHIC: U.S. Support Co. pay chart; Source: U.S. Support Co. The Times; Mugs: Page; Chambers