Call center industry is one of the most powerful sectors, which contributes majorly to the economies

of Asian countries like India, Philippines, Malaysia, and China. As per the report published by a
leading group, total spend of call center operations stands at approx. USD 350 billion. Even the call
center outsourcing market has seen a steady growth over the last 5 years, and accounts to USD 75
billion currently.

Though these numbers portray a rosy picture for the call center industry, there are couple of
challenges that the top management has to face on a day-to-day basis. Considering the fact that call
centers are the world's toughest work environments, this is not surprising! Handling irate customers,
dealing with crazy work timings and schedules, sustaining on the shoestring budgets and ensuring
highest levels of customer satisfaction are just some of the challenges faced by the top management.

What Are the Problems Faced by the Call Center Industry?

There are umpteen challenges faced by the call center industry. Here is a list of some of the major
challenges that the call center managers have to face frequently:

1. High Attrition Rate: The call center industry suffers from a high attrition rate. Every time a
trained agent leaves the firm, there are few people at hand to ensure the smooth execution of
work. This forces the company to hire more people to balance out the attrition, which results
into excess cost of recruiting, hiring, training and developing new staff.
2. Changing Geo-political Scenario: Political situations in Europe and US can affect the call
center industry drastically. Wars, bad economies, and citizen protests forcing the
governments to pass bills preventing outsourcing can be major reasons for political unrest,
and adversely affect the call center industry.
3. Increasing Client Expectations: Satisfying irate customers has always been a difficult task,
but the increasing customer expectations due to various social media channels and increased
business competition has made the situation even worse.
4. Flat Organizational Structure: The company structure at call centers is usually horizontal.
The career prospects of the employees are usually limited and this results in the organization
losing top talent. This flat work structure additionally demoralizes top performers from doing
well, which hinders productivity and growth of the call center.
5. Lower Employee Engagement: Call centers are not able to keep their employees excited and
involved in their work. Due to the repetitive and stressful nature, call center jobs tend to
become very monotonous and fail to keep the employees engaged.
6. Tight Budgets: This has always been a major problem for the call center industry. Managing
the entire process with limited amount of resources has been a big challenge. This is
 particularly relevant to the public sector call centers which depend on funds allocated by the
government.
7. Health Issues: Working in night shift leads to serious health problems such as insomnia, RLS,
hypertension, and stress making the work timings debatable, which is one of the major
reasons for attrition, as candidates don't want to work at graveyard shifts, which can take a
toll on their health. After being in the call center industry for a considerable time, candidates
find it difficult to venture outside the BPO sector, as changed biological rhythms makes it
difficult for the candidates to accommodate to a different work environment and timings.
8. Reduced FCR Rates: FCR or First Call Resolution rate is important to achieve customer
satisfaction, and an extremely critical metric for call centers. With increasingly complex
queries coming in, it is not always possible to provide an immediate solution. If the callers
end up talking to multiple agents, the satisfaction level reduces drastically.
9. Failure to improve beyond a Point: It's being too optimistic to expect the performance graph
to be on an upswing infinitely. At some point, the statistics may plateau and the call center
may fail to improve its performance level beyond a particular point. This phase may or may
not be temporary. This leads to frustration of the managers and also the front line staff, as at
the end of the day they need to meet their targets!
10. Client Attrition: Customer attrition is a huge problem in the call center industry. At some
point or another, a customer may decide to deliberately end a deal with the service provider
or opt to avail the services of a competitor for different reasons. The cost of such losses can
be humongous.
11. Multitasking: Modern day call centers are equipped with latest software and tools to manage
different tasks. With a variety of products and vendors, an agent may be working on more
than 10 tools at any given time. With the process becoming complicated, agents may find it
difficult to tackle different systems at once.
12. Multi-channel Communication: The way people communicate has changed drastically over
the past decade. Apart from call and mail, people have resorted to using social media to send
the message across. This creates problems as it leaves call center agents puzzled which
channel to focus on.

Current State of the Global Call Center Industry

The call center industry has been repeatedly written off by some critics, yet it has not only survived,
but grew tremendously over the last decade despite several hurdles and provided jobs to billions of
youth globally, and continues to do so! Slowly, but surely, we have come to accept global call center
industry as an unavoidable part of the modern business environment. Today, almost all big
businesses avail call center solutions, and the revenue generated by the industry is at an all-time high.
Many smart organizations today choose to overcome typical call center challenges by outsourcing
their call center services to a reliable service provider, which helps them bypass all infrastructural
and administrative hassles while curtailing costs.

You may be interested in reading an article on the benefits of call center outsourcing to India.

Partner with Flat world to Overcome Your Business Challenges!

Flat world Solutions has been providing call center services for over 12 years, and knows how to
overcome the call center challenges and provide the best cost-effective solution. We hire native
multi-lingual call center agents to deliver the best services and build long-term relationships with
customers. Additionally, we have set up multiple delivery centers across the globe which allows us to
work in different time zones and even out any regional challenges and ensure quick response time.

If you are looking for hassle free call center services, feel free to get in touch with us.