Bangalore: Attrition in Indian call centres is the highest at 22 per cent in the Asia Pacific region, compared to China at 10 per cent, Philippines 13 per cent, Singapore 19 per cent and Malaysia 18 per cent, according to a study by Australian-based 'Callcentres.net'.

Presenting the Indian call centre industry benchmark study 2003 at the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) IT enabled services (ITES)-Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Strategy summit in Bangalore, Callcentres.net director Martin Conboy said that underlying the statistics, the trend revealed that the industry was showing enormous growth and rival companies were poaching staff.

The study covered 103 organisations, which had 547 call centres of the over 1,200 call centres in the country.

Conboy said the issues concerning the industry were the high turnover rate, shortage of skilled labour, low uptake of industry recognised training and agent performance optimisation.

Of the people who quit organisations, 67 per cent resigned, 9 per cent were dismissed and 7 per cent retired.

"Nearly 50 per cent of those who quit left the industry, while the rest went to other call centres," he said. Majority of the expenses by call centres go for labour and captive centres of companies spent more than outsourcees.

While the annual remuneration of a captive BPO was $ 1,809 paying significant in salary costs, the third party BPO paid about $ 1,553 annually with increase in overtime and performance incentive.

PTI