Someone hands in their notice. You ask why, and they say “personal reasons” and you nod, because what else can you do? It’s not like you can push back on that.
But we’ve learned something interesting: “personal reasons” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
And when we dug into our survey of over 100 contact centre professionals, a pattern emerged that might change how you hear those words.
43% of people who left a contact centre role for “personal reasons” were office-based workers.
That might not sound big until you know that office workers made up just 22% of our overall sample.
So office-based employees are almost twice as likely to leave for “personal reasons” as everyone else.
That’s not a coincidence, surely. That’s a signal.
It’s a signal that they didn’t hate the job.
But the real issue is that 71% of those “personal reasons” leavers said they enjoyed the role.
Read that again. Seven out of ten people who left weren’t leaving because they hated the work. They weren’t burned out by difficult calls or ground down by targets. They liked what they did. They just couldn’t make the logistics work.
“Personal reasons” is often polite resignation-speak for “this commute isn’t sustainable” or “I can’t do the school run and be at my desk for 9am” or “I’ve found something closer to home.”
You’re not losing these people because of the job. You’re losing them because of where the job is.
When we looked at people who’d stayed two years or more ( or who are still in their current role ) the split was clear:
The people who stick around aren’t sitting in your office five days a week. They’re the ones with flexibility built into their working pattern.
And when we looked at retention rates by work location, the gap was even starker:
Want to dig further into the data? Essential experience is another requirement that could be impacting your contact centre hiring plans.
There’s a big problem that comes with insisting on five days in the office. You’re not just affecting retention. You’re shrinking your candidate pool before you’ve even posted the job.
78% of the contact centre workers we surveyed work remotely or hybrid. That’s the market now. Its what people expect, what they’re used to, and increasingly what they’ll filter for when job hunting.
If you’re still advertising office-only roles, you’re fishing in an increasingly small pond. And the fish you do catch? They’re leaving at twice the rate of hybrid workers.
We get it. Not every business is ready for fully remote contact centre teams. There are valid concerns about training, culture, supervision, and data security. Some regulated environments have constraints that aren’t going away.
But hybrid exists. And the data suggests it might give you the best of both worlds.
You get people in the building often enough to build relationships, learn from colleagues, and feel part of something. They get the flexibility to manage their lives without choosing between their job and the school pickup.
Hybrid workers in our survey had the highest retention rate of any group. Not remote; hybrid. That’s worth paying attention to..
Next time someone tells you they’re leaving for “personal reasons,” it might be worth asking a gentler follow-up.
Because if the answer is really “I loved the job but the commute was killing me” or “I couldn’t make the hours work with childcare,” that’s actionable operational feedback that just having ‘personal reasons’ could be masking..
That’s something you can potentially fix – if not for them, then for the next person.
The data suggests a decent chunk of your attrition isn’t about the role, the team, or the pay. It’s about logistics. And logistics, unlike someone’s personality or motivation, is something you can change.
This is one of seven findings from The Great Contact Centre Survey- our research into what contact centre workers wish employers knew about attracting, hiring, and keeping the right people.
