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In 2013, Quest Diagnostics, a clinical lab company that conducts diagnostic tests in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, consolidated its 20 call centers into two, located in Lenexa, Kansas, and Tampa, Florida. The change was intended to reduce overhead costs. The two cities were chosen because the cost of living in them was comparatively low; Quest wanted to pay its call-center employees as little as possible.
It didn’t work. By 2015, the pay was $13 per hour, which was slightly above the market rate. But the job required such a high level of familiarity with laboratory work, coupled with an ability to empathize with patients who called in, some of them seriously ill, that a $13 hourly wage was not high enough. So the call centers were understaffed. As a result, callers’ wait times routinely exceeded two minutes, and, once answered, the calls were transferred to overworked supervisors about 12 percent of the time. Turnover rose from the low teens to 34 percent, which cost Quest $10.5 million in lost productivity and hiring and training costs.
None of this will probably strike you as strange or unfamiliar. Lousy service is the norm at call centers, because the priority is on keeping labor costs down and settling for a level of service that’s just barely good enough to get by.
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