RP call centers reel from world’s highest turnover

DAVAO CITY, Philippines — Like zombies, they stumbled out of the elevator: haggard, red-eyed, and sleepy in shabby, crumpled clothes and disheveled hair. Some in sandals and pajamas, their hands gripping either a big coffee mug or a water bottle, they chatter away in English. This is a typical early morning scene in one of the Philippines’ biggest call center firms along Ayala Avenue in Makati City after a graveyard shift that starts at 10 p.m. and ends at 6 a.m. Despite efforts by the country’s call center companies to glamorize the industry, call center agents are resigning, job-hopping, transferring or being fired by the hundreds as fast as they are being hired. That image of a “successful call center executive making it in the business world" is lost to these call center agents who are just too glad to quit the industry. Turnover rate in the country’s call centers has gotten so worse that it has hit 60 to 80 percent, according to the Call Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP). This has given the Philippines the world’s highest turnover rate for call centers worldwide. Globally, it is an accepted norm in the industry to have a 30 to 40 per cent turnover. Both Australia and India call centers have turnover rates of only six to 10 percent. Top government officials are alarmed that an emerging industry that has generated around 2 billion US dollars in annual revenues is reeling from a worsening turnover crisis. “It’s like a zoo factory over there and we’re the new blue collar workers," says Rommel Benitez, 32, who quit his call center job last week, his eyes still bulging from dark eyebags, from lack of sleep. “You can’t relax, we’re always in a hurry. We’re always being watched. Coffee break is barely 15 minutes and our lunch at midnight is under time pressure that we have a hard time swallowing our food." Catriona Wallace, researcher and industry analyst with the Journal of Service Industry Management said the high turnover oftentimes is the result of a “deliberate strategy of frequent employee replacement “to provide enthusiastic and highly motivated customer service at low cost to the call center. “What you see here is an industry-wide policy of firing and replacing employees to keep their workforce fresh and motivated." Wallace said. Industry analyst Ben Teehankee lambasted this policy among call center firms to keep changing their employees to keep them fresh and enthusiastic." This strategy is not consistent with giving good jobs to Filipinos and developing people for higher job responsibilities," says Teehankee, who chairs the Human Resource Management Department of La Salle School of Business in Manila. Broken promises and misleading advertising by the country’s call centers were also blamed by call agents who quit or “requested to be fired" to avoid paying penalties for quitting too early. Many call center firms are still denying this is happening. The nation’s big dailies are filled with full-page ads with screaming headlines like: “Are you getting paid for your performance ?" “Ride your future with us!" “Great careers happen overnight!" “Entrust your dreams with us!" “Earn as much as P40,000 a month!" “Get our P10,000 signing bonus!" Most of the call centers which came out with these advertisements either ignored or neglected the promises they made, according to Marrisa Tiongko, 25, another call center agent who quit recently. “I was promised 15,000 pesos monthly salary and another 5,000 pesos for food and transport allowance during training—- but I got only 11,500 monthly with no training allowance. They lied. It wasn’t worth it," says Tiongko, a masscom graduate from Legaspi City Most call canter agents, after they passed a two-week training, usually get only 11,500 to 13,000 monthly plus benefits like SSS coverage, health insurance, housing plan,etc—– which are deducted from the agent’s salary every month. This is equivalent to less than 300 US dollars monthly in the Philippines, a far-cry from the US call center agent average salary of 2,500 US dollars monthly. Many American call center companies made the Philippines their favorite choice for investments in business process outsourcing (BPO) precisely due to cheap labor from abundant, highly-skilled English-speaking Filipinos," quips a human resource manager of People Support, Inc. Joji Ilagan-Bian, president of Six-Eleven Inc, a Davao-based call center firm, however remains very bullish about the future of the country’s call center industry. The Philippines, according to Bian, is a big player in the global market for BPO and has been cited one of the top countries worldwide for BPO investments. BPO services offered by call centers include marketing, sales, customer care, investor relations, bookings, etc. Although the Philippines and India have the most number of call centers in the world, " it’s fascinating to note that Indian call centers are now moving to Philippine cities," says Bian, who also runs a large training institute in Davao for call center agents with ready jobs waiting for them in Manila and Makati call center companies. Davao ranks third in English-speaking skills in a recent survey of 12 Philippines cities. As more and more call centers are cropping up in the major cities of Manila, Makati, Quezon, Cebu, Bacolod, Iloilo, Dumaguete, the number of qualified English-speaking applicants available nationwide is no longer keeping up with the fast-rising numbers of call centers seeking desperately for applicants. More than a hundred call centre companies in the country are scrambling over each other today, trying to entice any English-speaking applicant they can lay their hands on—- whether very young or very old, Filipino or foreigner, parttime or fulltime, retired or moonlighters, etc.—- as long as they can speak very good English. In one Makati-based call center, it’s not surprising to find young agents like 19 year old Sandy Tordessilllas, a student at Letran University, sitting side-by-side at the operations center with retired teacher Leonardo Manriquez, 64, from Pangasinan or even a foreigner like Maxim Motovsky, 52, a Russian trader who speaks good English and wants to earn extra money. “As long as they speak very good English, as long as they pass our one-month training, we’ll hire them and pay them well," says a human resource manager at Convergys, one of the country’s biggest call centers with branches in Makati, Quezon, Pasig, Bacolod and Cebu cities. The high turnover rate in the industry is also blamed on call center training programs which failed to produce many good agents for the jobs. “Our training was a disaster. I was glad they fired me. We can’t focus and think during training at two in the morning. That kind of training doesn’t make sense to me." says Jayson Ramirez, 34, an entrepreneur who needed extra income. At Convergys, training managers boast to new trainees that only one out of every 100 applicants they interviewed are actually hired. “So, you’re the best, the cream of the crop!" he tells a trainee. Eventually, only 3 to 5 out of every 20 trainees survive an intensive one-month training. Rejection and termination of thousands of English-speaking trainees in many call centers nationwide in their efforts " to keep standards high in the industry" is costing the call center industry millions of pesos in wasted training costs, admits one training manager of Advanced Contact Solutions. Both ACS and Convergys have “exit interviews" for all call center agents resigning or getting fired, to find out the reasons and causes of the high turnover rate in the industry. A pattern is slowly emerging from these studies—- bad training design, oppressive trainors, too much stress, too much pressure, ‘prison-like’ condition, pay not worth the effort, etc. It may take some time to really get to the bottom of the Philippine call center industry’s abnormally high turnover rate. davaotoday.com