A contact center agent’s average tenure is three years. All 2.79 million agents change their jobs every three years. The industry will have 930,000 vacancies every year, which equates to approximately 77,000 vacancies a month. If you’re leaving university with a student loan
to pay off, there’s no shortage of vacancies.
It’s tough for newcomers to the workforce. Everyone wants previous experience. Contact centers are less likely to demand that. Joining a contact center attached to a specific industry can get you a grounding in that industry. As well as industry experience, you will also develop your people skills.
You will learn to work with various programs and applications from day one. This will improve your technical skills and, more importantly, develop your ability to learn how to use technology. Technology changes all the time, but it will always be with us.
The contact centers industry is unusually “democratic.” Over the past 12 years, I have worked with more than 200 contact centers on three continents. In most cases, the managers started their careers as agents. The industry also needs data analysts, IT specialists,
developers, trainers, and coaches. Many of them started their careers as agents.
The pandemic forced many companies to abandon face-to-face operations, relying on their contact centers to communicate with customers. Customers got used to doing business online. Now, many customers don’t want to go back to physically visiting a branch. Companies
also welcome the change. Offices and shops are expensive to run in relation to the number of customers they serve. Companies are looking to expand their contact center operations as part of their strategy to go digital.
Companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots to handle simple interactions. This increases capacity without increasing headcount and frees up humans to handle more challenging interactions. As automated systems handle simple tasks,
human agents will handle more complex requests or help out customers who having trouble dealing with the bots. Human agents will need to be better trained both in terms of product and service knowledge and also in terms of emotional intelligence and communication skills.