Those skills are used to advance in the call center industry or people are taking those skills and going somewhere else. To a certain degree, no matter what you do, you're never going to fix the attrition problem. Factors other than moving up or moving on contribute to attrition, however. Call centers are stressful. According to Peggy Moretti at Intelegy, the average call center employee talks to 60 people a day.
Training is often inadequate.
And as Graubart points out, call centers are usually regimented environments that employ numerous metrics to evaluate individual and group performance. Employees coming from retail or administrative positions may not be accustomed to such a structured environment. Given today's labor market, retaining staff is imperative. Despite Dowling's pessimism, a number of tools can be used to retain staff. John Wolfe of Sky Alland agrees.