Resume.io has uncovered that the contact center industry receives the lowest number of job applications in the UK.
The resume-related services provider, Resume.io, analyzed application data from the business-focussed social media platform LinkedIn to find that contact center job postings were only getting an average of 0.1 applications each day.
By contrast, venture capital and private equity were shown to be the most competitive industries, with 23.69 daily applications per job.
Why So Few Applicants?
Resume.io quoted a description of contact centers as being “a place designed in a way that strips workers of their rights”. With tough discipline measures in place, strict targets with results that are closely monitored, low pay, and, of course, the emotional tax of speaking to customers who are often unhappy with the service or even being contacted in the first place.
Call center jobs are also frequently poorly paid and come with long, stressful hours. With few benefits to accompany this, workers will often look for an exit as soon as a better job offer comes up.
Another major factor was the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted the labor market, particularly affecting public-facing roles and in-office work that can both apply to customer service positions.
On the flip side to this, the rise of remote work has made it possible to allay these health concerns in certain cases as it means agents can operate from the safety and comfort of their own homes.
Remote work brings with it its own problems of full-time staff needing to now compete with those operating from the gig economy, plus companies fighting over the same pool of workers, leading to talent retention issues.
All of these issues might have been stoically borne by workers in the past, but with the revolution in working expectations that the pandemic brought, contact centers have been punished for failing to meet these new standards.
Contact Centers Are Not Alone
We need to put the negatives into perspective a little bit. Firstly, contact centers are not the only ones that are enduring low applicant numbers right now.
Neil Carberry, Chief Executive Officer at Recruitment and Employment Federation, explains how it has also become a challenge to recruit talent within the education sector: “A double-digit percentage rise in the past few weeks to nearly 40,000 nurseries, primary and secondary job vacancies shows the scale of the issues with pay, workload, and conditions of service among teachers.
Schools are increasingly struggling to hire as the impact of several years of below-target initial recruitment plays out.
When the economy takes a major hit, as it did during the pandemic, the financial repercussions trickle down, making it impossible for industries like education and customer service to offer more attractive prices.
Similarly, the nature of both of these industries frequently comes hand in hand with unavoidable stresses and pressures that come in and out of focus as compensation waxes and wanes.
The Solution
A lot of what has changed employee perception is out of the contact center industry’s control. Brexit, the pandemic, and the ease of outsourcing call center jobs to agents and companies abroad are all examples of this.
Nevertheless, there is much that is within the control of contact center organizations.
In an article by Rob Wilkinson, CX Solutions Consultant at evaluagent last year, he puts forward some ideas as to how contact centers can remedy this recruitment crisis:
“By changing the way they market themselves to potential candidates, investing in employee engagement and retention, embracing technology, and having the right recruitment partner in place, contact centers can overcome this challenge and attract the skilled workers they need to succeed in 2023 and beyond.”
Employee well-being is clearly one big area in which the industry could improve in various ways. Of course, there will always be disgruntled customers that workers will have to deal with but contact centers could at least start thinking more compassionately towards their staff between the calls.
With all the new technology that is at their fingertips, tracking and monitoring the progress of every call made by their workers, it could just as easily be used to locate when emotional support is required. Evidently, if contact centers continue to focus purely on numbers, they will keep losing people.
Artificial intelligence is another major player in the world of customer service with bots, insights, rapidly sourced answers, and more coming to market every day. Many of these AI technologies have already reduced agent workloads, particularly when it comes to repetitive manual tasks.
There is still much more that AI technology and contact centers could be doing, however, to point their resources back to their people in order to get these applicant figures off the ground.
