What is the real cost for you to recruit new employees into your customer service team? Contact centers are well known for their high turnover of employees, known as attrition in the business jargon. Attrition in US contact centers is usually around 30-45%, but in 2022 it jumped to around 65% and over 80% in some specific verticals.
The bottom line is that you have to lose and replace around two-thirds of your contact center every year. This already sounds expensive, but can we put any dollar values on the cost to recruit new people into your company?
- As stated in a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, hiring an employee in a company with 0-500 people costs an average of $7,645.
- Another study by the Society for Human Resource Management states that the average cost to hire an employee is $4,129, with around 42 days to fill a position.
- According to Glassdoor, the average company in the United States spends about $4,000 to hire a new employee, taking up to 52 days to fill a position.
The average figures vary from one study to another. Different industries have different costs and more specialized roles can be more expensive to recruit for, but in general, it is clear that each person costs several thousand dollars to hire. Assuming $5,000 as a modest estimate (at the lower end of most studies) and even a small contact center with 200 employees will burn around $650,000 a year just in recruitment costs.
This is where GigCX gets interesting. The cost to hire and onboard a GigCX agent is a fraction of a traditional employee because they are contractors – you pay them if they deliver a service. All the traditional bureaucracy and expenses associated with hiring full-time employees can be bypassed.
You can also train more than you usually need, so the ability to flex is possible. Creating a bench of talent this way allows you to easily scale up for busy periods, such as Black Friday, or to react to an unexpected ramp-up.
Compared to traditional customer service agents, the effect on attrition is even more interesting. GigCX agents want to work from home. They want flexibility, it’s what they choose by working this way. They want their work to fit around their life. They also want to choose which brands they work for – so they can choose only the brands they like. If you love consumer electronics you can support consumer electronics customers. If you love fashion, you can focus on supporting customers of fashion brands.
For all these reasons, GigCX attrition is almost non-existent. People work for the brands they like for the hours they choose – this is a long way from hiring people into a contact center and asking them to work long hours for an insurance client whether they are interested in insurance or not.
You don’t need to go all-in on gig. Try it as a flexible layer on top of your existing processes and see how it works. I guarantee that once you see that you can forget about attrition and enormous recruitment costs then you will become very interested.
If you have any questions, contact the author, LiveXchange’s CRO, Terry Rybolt, via LinkedIn. You can follow our company page on LinkedIn to make sure you always get the latest opinion and news on GigCX in your news feed.