Contact Center Staffing Trends: This Year in Review

Labor market turbulence, Gen AI, return-to-work orders and even gig CX are just a few of the headline staffing trends that have shaped business outcomes inside contact centers this year. As 2024 comes to a close, contact centers are reflecting on the last twelve months, staffing wins, staffing challenges, and wondering how they can meet or exceed their targets next year. 

Despite perpetual agent turnover, contact center revenues were predicted to grow 13% this year according to CMS Wire. While that prediction is promising, business process outsourcing (BPO) is dynamic and can vary by region, talent availability, budget and so much more. Trends manifest as patterns or conditions that affect nearly all contact centers, regardless of their unique operating parameters. These are the top staffing trends affecting contact centers this year. 

Contact Centers Are At Odds with a Turbulent Labor Market

Working at a call center can be difficult, given that these employees are on the frontlines of live customer interactions - not all employees have the skills to do the job well. Employees who don’t perform on the job often leave. This is just one factor contributing to the ongoing employee turnover rate in contact centers struggling to keep up.

Despite churn, contact centers are under immense pressure to deliver unwavering customer experiences and keep costs as low as possible. These competing interests are at odds with one another, leading to eroding experiences across the entire contact center environment, not just for customers. Consider the following description:

“Pressures often manifest in the form of executive decisions that prioritize budget allocations and result in insufficient staffing levels and a compromised Employee Experience. … This limits its ability to innovate and adapt, as well as contributes to a sense of entropy as management struggles to effect meaningful change within the confines of an unyielding enterprise model. …Over time, consistent underfunding or underprovisioning erodes quality across every facet of the Contact Center, from strategic decision-making to frontline agent performance.”

Contact centers are juggling competing challenges from staffing to budget, employee experience, and measuring customer interactions. McKinsey surveyed 341 customer care leaders as part of their 2024 contact center survey and found the top challenges contact centers face continue to be:

• rising call volumes
• high levels of employee attrition
• persistent talent shortages.

As the top challenges, topics like attrition and talent shortages also got a lot of attention this year.

Attrition is Ongoing and Talent Shortages are Rampant

Relative to other industries, the turnover rate in contact centers is the highest. Contact centers experience a 40% agent turnover rate on average, but some have reported as high as 100%! The ongoing labour shortage is hitting call centers harder than other sectors because these environments already struggle with issues like attrition and churn. Contact centers have been reporting turnover rates as high as 50% since 1998 primarily due to stressful working conditions and low compensation.

On top of that, agent turnover is getting worse. A Customer Management Practice report found that 40% of companies had even greater agent turnover in the last year than in 2020. Today contact centers lose 600k annually due to attrition.

Randstad projections in Canada demonstrate the discrepancy between positions and agents available in the customer service sector. Contact centers have more positions than they do applicants. Now, there are even on-call CX gigs to help contact centers fill gaps. 

The Rise of “GigCX”

The term “GigCX” has been properly coined in this article by Call Center Power who explains that it’s a phrase for contract work in the customer service and contact center industry. In response to the ongoing staffing challenges, a few companies have emerged with agents available for contracts like ShyftOff and GigCX Marketplace. These solutions promise contact centers high-quality agents for lower costs, although shortages have more likely been the forcing function behind these outsourced services. 

Limitless conducted a vast survey of contact centers and agents worldwide and found that GigCX has been trending upwwards with 83% of CX leaders either already using or planning to use gig workers in their operations. That’s an 11% increase from 2022 when this figure was 72%. The same survey also asked CX workers how they felt about all the GenAI hype. 

AI is Evolving

Contact centers are inundated with promises of AI efficiency from accounting to operations, and hiring. As tantalizing as these promises can seem, the robots haven’t taken over contact centers yet. “While AI is undoubtedly on the rise and its influence is growing all the time, it’s not going to simply sweep the board and replace all jobs at once. What it lacks is human understanding; warmth; empathy; the years of experience an individual might have; and soft skills, such as communication, leadership, time management and intuition,” says Novo Constare, CEO of IndeedFlex and author on Forbes. While CX author, Simon Kriss, says AI is the future of customer experience, the respondents from the Limitless survey somewhat disagreed.

The respondents said they were encouraged by AI, but not convinced about GenAI, saying they think it “lacks the necessary capabilities to be useful to the CX industry,” while 32% said the impact of GenAI isn’t clear.

Contact centers typically operate with agents in nearshore or offshore environments to save on costs. What’s interesting is the new wave of contact centers that can now outsource Gen AI from nearshore and offshore environments to access this technology at a lower cost. Xira shared some recent thoughts about how the GenAI trend is shaping contact centers:

“Gen AI conversations have been at the forefront of the cost reduction discussion for call centers. Xira has been in the AI industry for more than 8 years and we automate customer and enterprise communications with Gen AI. Companies who are able to access AI through nearshore partners, Mexico in this case, benefit from a significant cost reduction compared to onshore competitors in the United States, and we’re seeing more and more contact centers taking advantage of this. The other trend is around security. Most AI models are being trained on third-party data, but tools like Xira make their models private and train them on a specific company's data, so we are seeing this technology become more effective and secure for everyone." - Bernardo Camarena, US Operations Director, Xira

Camarena raises a valid point, which is how the AI model being used was trained, and on which data. Contact centers need to sift through the myriad of AI and now Gen AI solutions to find reputable tech firms that can demonstrate results and speak to the validity of their data science. Technology has done a lot for contact centers, but nothing is as simple as a quick AI fix.

Solutions Aren’t as Simple as Technology

Aside from filling gaps with on-call CX agents, talent shortages are being met with automated and AI solutions to help curb rising costs, but these aren’t necessarily helping downstream to improve the customer experience. For example, 13% of contact centers report they are already piloting Gen AI, and in another survey contact center leaders said they are currently using AI for:

• chatbots 
• automated email response systems
• agent training and support
• back-office analytics
• decision making

The same survey reported that consumers of all demographic age ranges, including Gen Z, preferred human interactions as much as they preferred automated solutions. Forbes reported that as much as 86% of customers reported preferring human interactions to a chatbot experience.

While contact centers may be tempted to automate as much as possible to save costs, end consumers still want to interact with humans. One author explains:

“most consumers prefer human interaction despite the industry’s unprecedented investment in automation, illustrating the conflict between profitability and consumer demands. Companies will continue to seek innovative solutions to lower costs, but these investments may not satisfy customers.” 

Only so much can and should be automated, if CX is the goal. Humans are and will always be needed in service. At the end of the day, happy agents will deliver better service and attrit less, so contact center employers need to focus on giving people the conditions they desire at work.

Return to Office Isn’t Really Working

More than two-thirds of employers reported increased productivity from their telecommuters, but still the call to bring employees back to the office has hit every industry including contact centers. Agents are continuing to work remotely despite the ongoing headlines about return-to-office orders and policies coming into effect.

Call Center Helper’s recent benchmarking report surveyed UK call center leaders who said 66% of employees work in a hybrid model - both remotely and in the office. 23% were in the office, and only 11% had employees that were fully remote. 

In North America, SQM Group surveyed 500 contact centers and predicted the industry’s “post-COVID-19 workforce model will be 60%-80% agents WFH.” We caught up with one industry expert at CCW Las Vegas this year who had similar observations since working from home benefits both employees and contact centers:

“The biggest trend in hiring this year is around the return to office policy. We’re seeing a hesitance from applicants and those working from home now to go back to the office. Even from the company side, we’re seeing this trend because it’s more costly for the call center. Having agents work from home allows the contact center to scale up and hire outside their area, and gives the company more flexibility.” - John Hussey, CEO, System Requirements Lab

It’s no surprise that the trend continues to be either hybrid or remote working models in the contact center industry, and being fully in the office is exceptional since working remotely has paid off. As seen in other industries, agents who worked from home performed at a satisfactory level or delivered even better results, reported Contact Center Pipeline. 

That’s a Wrap on 2024 Staffing Trends

Contact centers are doing their best despite mounting pressures and turbulent market conditions, but they still rely on finding skilled humans to do the jobs well, whether it be a sales, CS or IT support role. That may be true but it’s easier said than done. Contact centers continue to struggle to source and retain talented agents.

To help contact centers combat common staffing challenges like attrition, a multi-prong approach can help, including measures like sourcing talent from overlooked demographics and assessing candidate skills instead of degrees during the hiring process. 85% of Gen Z respondents in one survey said they preferred a skills-based hiring process because it allows them to show their abilities. Gen Z has also said they prefer to work from home because of the flexibility it provides and because they have different priorities than former generations. Contact centers can easily control these factors and offer agents these types of conditions, and more. The meta trend here is that despite heaps of technological innovation, keeping contact center agents happy is the key to contact center success in 2025 and beyond.

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Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Roman Kraft

Image 1: Via Call Center Helper

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