Recruitment 

The average salary for a Contact Centre or Customer Service professional in Australia is $89,000.

Entry-level roles such as Customer Service Reps and QA Specialists start lower, at around $65K-68K. Moving up the career ladder, Call Centre Managers earn around $90K-110K, with Heads of Customer Service earning more – around $120K.

Currently, the top most desirable job factors on the minds of great Contact Centre & Operations talent include:

1. Work-life balance and flexible work arrangements
2. Salary and benefits
3. Generating positive environmental or social impact
4. Professional development opportunities
5. Working in a great team

Great soft skills are increasingly important to Australian employers. Hard skills come and go with the trend of the day, and are easier to train. Exceptional soft skills are often what makes the difference between a high-performing Contact Centre & Customer Service professional and their peers.

Key in-demand skills include:

1. Empathy and EQ
2. Communication and collaboration
3. Time management and personal efficiency
4. Adaptable mindset
5. Resilience

These five skills enable a great Customer Service professional to thrive in a modern, changeable customer environment, understanding the complex and nuanced needs of customers, working quickly and effectively, and adapting to often sudden change.

Key to improving employee retention in any team is to first understand the key factors driving people away. Generally, the best way to get these insights is to find out from your people, either through one-on-one meetings or anonymous feedback surveys. 

In our experience, these are four of the top factors affecting employee retention in Australia: 

1. Uncompetitive pay or benefits 
2. A lack of pay increases 
3. Seeing no future at the company 
4. Toxic workplace culture 

When you understand your key problem areas, you can then begin to implement strategies that directly address the root cause of these issues. Common strategies we see include: 

1. Offering pay on-par with competitors 
2. Providing desirable benefits to top up any pay discrepancies 
3. Creating a transparent, inclusive work culture 
4. Ensuring each employee has a clear career progression pathway 

This always depends on your business objectives, budget, time and the complexities of the market. 

In-house recruitment can be both highly efficient and very cost-effective, giving you total control of the hiring pipeline and a sense of ownership over the process.  

However, if your team lacks the capacity to run this process effectively, you’re hunting for niche or hard-to-find skills, or the market is experiencing heavy competition, a specialist recruitment partner can provide that extra level of certainty. This is because recruitment teams like ours have spent years building vast talent networks across the country (and globe), enabling us to: 

• Access hidden talent pools 
• Circumvent market competition to headhunt right-fit talent directly
• Maintain a team of high-quality temp staff who can hit the ground running in under 24 hours 

These factors make specialist recruitment teams very popular for finding urgent talent, key skills areas and high-level professionals.