Lying Is Not Moral, so Why Do BPO Leaders Do It?

If you’re reading this article and an American citizen, you may remember a time in American political discourse when using the word “lie” was tantamount to showing up on the US Senate floor in your underwear. While that time may have been just 2014, a mere 5 years ago, the world “lie” — mendacity — now has become an all too common, yet accurate, word in our political discourse.

Four years ago, as a new leader in the BPO industry, I came to the industry with a set of expectations, and a personal set of beliefs, which quickly collided with the reality of working cross-border, and within this industry. One of the key things I learned is that there is a tremendous amount of distrust in our industry, between the BPO buyer, BPO supplier, the customer on the phone, and of course the Agent in the seat.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article for Contact Center Pipeline magazine on “Moral Leadership in the Contact Center.” In that article, I argued that leaders within contact centers had to find their moral center, and realize when their agents were being moral, amoral, or immoral. If they did, they’d be rewarded by good performance.

Thats article spoke to just one aspect of why moral behavior from BPO leaders is essential. But as I became more experienced in this industry, I learned that the industry has a reputation for immoral, unethical behavior. For certain reasons, the industry has found it acceptable to do what we now lamentably find it acceptable for politicians to do: lie.

While I have witnessed a large amount of immorality or unethical behavior in business practices in our industry, this is a large topic, and so in this article, I want to address simply one chronic lie in the BPO industry: attrition rates.

The Current State of Affairs

The BPO industry has long struggled to design and implement effective solutions to its attrition problem. Everything from workplace perks and higher pay to retention bonuses has been tried, but most have failed. As statistical data shows, people are still leaving their call center jobs at a higher rate compared to other industries, such as retail and service industries.

Attrition rates are so bad in the BPO industry that companies are forced to measure their attrition monthly rather than annually as is the norm.

Because high attrition rates have become an accepted part of doing business for suppliers and buyers alike, most BPO service contracts simply build attrition into the economic terms of the contract, which formalizes its acceptance.

Nevertheless, most people in the industry are already aware of this truth: When the person occupying that seat in a contact center doesn’t want to be there, the chances that they’ll deliver a quality customer experience are slim.

What better way to understand high attrition rates than to understand its impact on the life of one Agent. Below is a story inspired by one of Fair Trade Outsourcing’s agents who told me her experience in the first person. I’ve paraphrased a bit.

Amy: Set up to Fail in a Survivalist Culture

This was not Amy’s first BPO job, and she needed it to support her extended family of six. Amy’s mother ran a small food store out of her home, but Amy was the primary breadwinner for her family at just 22.

Amy had tried and failed to make it at other call centers. It was her third attempt. In the first call center, she didn’t make it through training because she struggled to understand the trainers who spoke so fast. In the second, she made it through training but then was unable to meet her required productivity metrics, because she had to keep asking callers to repeat themselves. She was fired after a month.

On her third try, Amy was still struggling but doing better. She was already 4 months in, and about to become a non-probationary, regular employee. Finally, she would have a small bit of financial security for her family.

But she wasn’t there yet. In her last review with a QA person, she was told that she was close to being fired because she wasn’t taking enough calls. Her quality was good, they said, but that she had 2 weeks to improve or she would be fired. She told the QA person that her managers often yelled at her to work faster, which made it harder. The QA person said that was the way it was and Amy had to figure out a way to deal with it.

She went to the ladies’ room and broke down crying. Her family needed this job.

In those two weeks before she was fired, she was absent from work three times because of the pressure she was under. Amy felt physically sick before going to work most days and was barely able to get through the day. On the day she was fired, Amy was resigned to it. She hoped she could find a job where the company would be more understanding of how long it takes to be proficient at a BPO job.

Published vs. Internal Attrition Rates: Why the Disparity?

There are many causes for attrition in the BPO industry, including high-pressure work environments like Amy’s. Given the persistence of the attrition problem in the industry globally, data on true attrition rates — unless companies are willing to publish it — is hard to come by.

Companies don’t want the world to know about the high-pressure work environments they create, which drives attrition. That’s why, besides what the industry publishes, the only additional source of comparison data is from former employees of BPO suppliers.

When internal attrition numbers are evaluated by BPO buyers of their BPO suppliers (when they can get them — some contracts prohibit it), the numbers usually track to 10% per month, and this has been the accepted “norm” within the industry. This means that the workforce turns over more than once a year.

The Call Center Association of the Philippines and the IT-Business Process Association of the Philippines have sporadically published data on attrition rates. The CCAP distributes yearly surveys to its members. These surveys are voluntary — in both participation and the response to survey questions. They don’t publish it on their website, nor make it available to members.

When they do report it, it’s usually only in response to a question asked by a member of the press. The number they report: 5 to 6 percent monthly attrition.

Ask any industry insider about attrition, and you’ll get a number around 10%. In some cases, as what we revealed in our whitepaper, that number can spike to 20% and above.

Why the Disparity?

CCAP presidents are surely industry insiders, so if they know the truth, why would they allow their association to report numbers they may know to be false? The answer lies in the methodology.

Since attrition numbers are voluntarily reported, there’s no independent audit oversight of the reporting of these numbers. Without independent oversight, given the accepted 10% attrition rate acknowledged by industry insiders, the credibility of the reports must be called into question. In other words, they’re lying.

Why would the CCAP lie about what they know to be true? Wouldn’t it harm their credibility if it became known? Yes, but only if it became known.

The answer lies in the details of the service contracts between larger BPO suppliers and BPO buyers. Specifically, these contracts contain two strong rights.

First, the buyer has audit rights over the supplier’s operations. Second, there’s strong confidentiality protection for everyone.

This means that even if buyers are given true attrition numbers by suppliers, they are barred from sharing them with industry associations, their peers, or the press. They can be used only to make internal decisions on their relationship with the supplier.

This leaves the industry in an incentive-vacuum relative to the true attrition picture. There is no motivation by industry associations to release true information, and suppliers are not fearful of under-reporting attrition to the industry association, because the real attrition rates will never be released to anyone but their clients — and then only upon request and for internal use.

So, they have no repercussions for lying, save losing a client. But when they’re competing with other firms with the same problem, it’s no longer seen as a problem — by everyone. It becomes a feature, not a bug. So the lying about the true numbers persists.

Lying About Attrition Rates Is Both Unethical and Immoral

Ultimately, the practices of the BPO industry that have made lying about attrition rates normal are not just unethical, but also immoral.

Lying is unethical. In a business relationship based on voluntary exchange — where two parties knowingly enter into a relationship based on certain perceived information- trust is supposed to be established so the exchange can happen. Unfortunately, a key measure of our industry’s ability to operate — the attrition rate — is used as an accepted form of unethical behavior.

But lying is also immoral. The business practices that drive up attrition are hurting fellow humans. Every high-pressure, stats-that-can’t be achieved work environment has a human cost. There are ten million Amy’s in our industry trying to survive. These lies are immoral because they are fellow humans, and our lies about attrition are covering up their misery, allowing it to perpetuate.

So, while there may be a business imperative for lying about attrition rates, there is also a cost. The cost of being immoral leaders, the economic costs of high attrition, and the risk of losing customers that low quality caused by high attrition begets. It’s a vicious cycle that the industry should look inward, immediately, to stop.

Of course, they can start by just stop lying.