2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report

February 28, 2020 Last Updated: June 29, 2023
Justin Call Centre KPIs & Metrics
2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report

Introducing the 2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report

With a severe lack of reliable benchmarking data available to the local Australian industry, the team at SMAART Recruitment have put together the 2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report based enabling you to benchmark your contact centre against over 24 different categories.

Over 100 contact centres in Australia completed the survey from smaller centres through to some of the large corporates providing a great insight into a range of metrics from salaries, recruitment, team sizes, training, technology, common KPIs, offshoring and more.

We’ve listed some of the key highlights of the 2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report below with lots of additional information contained within the full report.

A copy of the full 2019 report can be obtained from SMAART Recruitment, as well as the latest 2020/21 report.

Looking for the latest data? 

 

2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report Highlights:

  • Locations – Most contact centres were located in the CBD regions (50%) with 37% in the suburbs and 13% outside of the capital cities (e.g. regional areas)
  • Team Size – The average team size is 11.7 agents and no surprises, both Team Leaders and agents prefer smaller team sizes.
  • Employment type – Over 60% of employees are full-time permanent employees with the rest made up of permanent part-time, fixed-term contracts and casual.
  • Support roles – it takes more than just a contact centre manager/team leader to run a contact centre and these support roles were the most common:
    • Trainers
    • Workforce Planners
    • HR/Recruitment
    • Admin support
  • Average Salaries
    • Customer Service agent – $51,121 + super with an average bonus of $2,521
    • Outbound sales – $52,193 with an average bonus of $10,523 plus super
    • Inbound sales – $54,094 with an average bonus of $9,275 plus super
    • Team Leaders – $73,048 with average bonus of $4,354 plus super
    • Contact Centre Manager – $129,696 with an average bonus of $10,081 plus super
  • Rewards – the average budget for rewards is $349 per person per annum
  • Perks – Over 50% of contact centres in Australia offer free or subsidised gym memberships, fruit and snacks in the office, annual company bonus, additional sick leave days and discounted travel.
  • Retention – Best practice is 38% of contact centres have 100% retention after 1 month
  • Turnover – Average turnover is 45% annually with 22% external attrition and 23% internal attrition
  • Tenure – Average tenure is 22 months for frontline agents
  • Employee Satisfaction – 49.23% of contact centres measure it annually

 

 

  • Rosters – just under half of all contact centres are open weekends and nearly 90% of centres require staff to be available for both weekday and weekend work
  • Recruitment – 71% of recruitment is managed internally with 29% using recruitment agencies
  • Speed to competency – It’s a wide range but the most common is 39.19% of contact centres expect agents to be at full competency after 3 months
  • Agent performance – The most common review frequency for agents is monthly (40.79%) with the top KPIs Quality, CSAT, conversions.
  • Average Talk Time – for an 8 shift the average is 4 hours and 42 minutes
  • Average number of inbound calls – 42 calls per shift
  • Average number of outbound calls – 53 calls per shift
  • First Call Resolution – Over 23% of contact centres do not measure FCR with the majority of centres expecting between 70 – 90% or more FCR for inbound calls
  • Induction training – most centres average between 2 to 4 weeks using a mix of classroom and ‘on the floor’ training
  • Formal training – 28% of contact centres put staff through formal training before promoting them to a leadership position
  • Customer Satisfaction – NPS and First Call Resolution are the most common measures
  • Primary organisation metric – Customer Satisfaction scores (50% of all contact centres)
  • Abandonment rate – 60% of contact centres average between 1 to 5%
  • Wait time – 43% of contact centres have a wait time of 0-1 minute
  • New Technology:
    • 11.27% of contact centres are using Chatbots
    • 13.24% are using gamification
  • Offshoring – 31.08% of contact centres are using some offshore capability with nearly half (43.68%) expecting that to increase in the next 12 months
  • Top Challenges for the next 12 months:
    • Retention
    • Technology

These are just some of the highlights of the 46-page report.

If you’d like a copy of the full 2019 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report please contact SMAART Recruitment.

Recommended further reading:

Need some professional help with your contact centres?

  • Find all the upcoming industry training courses, conferences, webinars and more on the Industry Events Calendar >
  • Find consultants, recruitment agencies, outsourcers, trainers and more who all specialise in the contact centre and CX industry in Australia on the ACXPA Supplier Directory >

 

 

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply