2019 Australian Contact Centre Best Practice Report
This is where it started. The 2019 Contact Centre Best Practice Report was the first edition produced by Smaart Recruitment — a modest 48 pages that would grow into the most comprehensive report on the Australian contact centre industry.
Its purpose, as set out by James Witcombe, was simple: contact centres are constantly changing, and what was "best practice" last year can be redundant twelve months later. The real challenge for most leaders is knowing what "normal" actually looks like.
Every contact centre has areas where it excels, areas where it underperforms, and areas where it's simply average — but most leaders have no way of knowing which is which. This report set out to fix that.
This article is our summary of the key findings. The full report is produced and owned by Smaart Recruitment and is available from them at contactcentrebestpractice.com.au.
The first edition
48 pages — the baseline the entire series has been measured against ever since.
A pre-COVID snapshot
Only 29% of centres offered work from home. Within a year, that world had gone.
The 45% problem
The average contact centre was losing nearly half its staff every single year.
📌 Looking for the latest insights?
This is a historical edition. For current data, see the 2025 report — the most recent edition, with over 2,000 frontline agents surveyed and the ACXPA Call Centre Rankings included.
About this edition
The inaugural report was researched and written entirely by Smaart Recruitment, authored by James Witcombe (Director) — a big shout-out for starting something that has become an industry institution.
Unlike later editions, the 2019 report did not feature external contributing authors. ACXPA has contributed to every edition of this report since 2020, beginning with the following year's edition.
Key Findings from the 2019 Report
The first edition set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what does a normal Australian contact centre actually look like?
The answers were sobering. The average centre was losing nearly half its people every year, abandonment rates sat above 5%, and work from home was a rarity offered by fewer than a third of centres.
The Industry Snapshot
The 2019 report began by establishing the shape of the industry — the baseline every later edition would be measured against.
- Half of all contact centres (50%) were located in the CBD, with 37% in the suburbs and 12% outside a major city.
- 55% of respondents came from banking and finance, insurance or utility-based contact centres.
- The average contact centre size was 138 employees, including staff at all levels.
- The average team size was 11.7 agents.
Worth remembering
Work from home was offered by only around 29% of contact centres. Within twelve months the pandemic would make it the default — by the 2022 report, 76% of the workforce was working from home. It remains the single biggest structural change in the history of this report.
Salaries & Bonuses
The 2019 report established the first proper salary benchmarks for the Australian contact centre industry — the starting point for every year that followed.
💰 Looking for the latest salary data?
These figures are from 2019 and are now purely historical. For current benchmarks across every contact centre role, see our Australian Call Centre Salaries page — always kept up to date.
Frontline agent salaries (2019)
| Role | Average base | Average bonus | Top performer bonus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collections | $58,136 | $1,166 | — |
| Helpdesk | $54,673 | $3,666 | — |
| Inbound Sales Agent | $54,094 | $9,275 | $20,056 |
| Outbound Sales Agent | $52,193 | $10,523 | $22,447 |
| Outbound Lead Generation | $51,772 | $3,600 | $5,832 |
| Customer Service | $51,521 | $2,521 | $4,653 |
| Market Research | $46,000 | Rarely offered | — |
Customer Service roles averaged $51,521 + super, with a range of $42,000 to $75,000 and 73% of base salaries falling between $46,000 and $56,000. Notably, 38% of contact centres paid no bonus at all for customer service roles.
Sales roles told a different story. While base salaries were comparable, bonuses were transformative: the top 25% of outbound sales performers were earning annual bonuses of over $35,000.
Team Leader salaries (2019)
| Role | Average base | Average bonus | Top performer bonus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Helpdesk Team Leader | $74,993 | $5,000 | $12,500 |
| Sales Team Leader | $73,268 | $9,608 | $18,170 |
| Customer Service Team Leader | $73,048 | $4,354 | $7,033 |
| Customer Service Assistant TL | $70,401 | $2,778 | $2,917 |
| Market Research Team Leader | $70,000 | $3,750 | $3,750 |
| Sales Assistant Team Leader | $66,250 | $4,125 | $11,750 |
Customer Service Team Leader base salaries covered a wide band — $60,000 to over $100,000 + super — with 30% paid above $80,000. Sales team leader salaries were far more condensed, with 74% falling between $65,000 and $80,000.
Specialist and management salaries (2019)
| Role | Average base | Average bonus | Top performer bonus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operations Manager | $107,574 | $6,892 | $9,533 |
| Contact Centre Training Manager | $94,341 | $4,000 | $7,251 |
| Campaign Manager | $88,400 | $6,250 | Over $25,000 |
| Workforce Planner | $86,802 | $4,769 | $10,583 |
| Contact Centre Trainer | $76,000 | $3,333 | $5,499 |
All salaries + super. Source: Smaart Recruitment 2019 Contact Centre Best Practice Report. For current benchmarks, see Australian Call Centre Salaries.
Retention & Attrition
The single most confronting finding of the 2019 report was the sheer scale of staff turnover.
The 45% problem
On average, a contact centre was losing 45% of its staff annually — split roughly evenly between 22% external attrition (people leaving the business) and 23% internal attrition (people moving elsewhere within it).
- Best practice: just 18% of contact centres had an average tenure of three years or more.
- The strongest performers held retention close to 100% for the first 3–6 months — the period where most centres bleed people.
- Exit surveys were completed by 75% of contact centres.
- The average reward and recognition budget was just $349, and a typical centre offered four to five staff perks.
- 15% of contact centres provided more than the legislated 10 sick days.
Performance
The report established the first industry-wide benchmarks for contact centre performance — many of which look remarkably good compared with today.
- The average abandonment rate was 5.5%, with 6% of contact centres achieving 0% and 11% recording an average wait time in queue of zero minutes.
- The average customer churn rate was 12.7%, with 9% of centres achieving a churn rate of 0–5%.
- Agents spent an average of 4 hours and 42 minutes on the phone in an 8-hour shift.
- For outbound teams, the average expectation was 53 calls per day — though 33% of centres expected 30 or fewer.
- Frontline agents carried an average of five KPIs, with call quality, customer satisfaction and sales the most common.
Training & Development
Even in 2019, the report identified a gap between what contact centres said mattered and what they actually invested in — a theme that persists to this day.
- 28% of contact centres had an average speed to competency of four months or longer.
- The average spend on team leader training was just $1,900 per year.
- Only 28% of contact centres put staff through formal training before promoting them into a leadership position.
- Succession planning occurred at some level in 76% of contact centres.
- Best practice: 40% of contact centre managers personally spoke with new recruits before they started — and in the best centres, training hours were identical to working hours.
Technology
In 2019, technology in the contact centre was still largely about infrastructure rather than intelligence. There was no AI chapter and no self-service chapter — automation appeared as a single question about chatbots.
- Just 11.3% of contact centres were using a chatbot — 88.7% were not.
- Work from home was offered by around 29% of contact centres — and was seen as a perk rather than a structural feature.
- Best practice: some contact centres using cloud-based solutions were beginning to allow staff genuine location flexibility, a signal of what was to come.
How much changed, how fast
Compare this with the 2025 edition, where 64% of contact centres report AI meeting or exceeding expectations and only 9% have no plans to implement it. In six years, the technology conversation moved from "which phone system" to "which AI strategy".
What "Best Practice" Meant in 2019
The report closed by defining what a genuinely best-practice contact centre looked like. It's a useful benchmark to hold against your own operation today.
- Staff are treated well — better than average pay, attractive rewards and benefits, and high flexibility with rostering (including work from home options), reflected in rising employee satisfaction scores.
- Teams are structured properly — trained, qualified team leaders coaching the right number of agents, with formal leadership training given before they move into the role.
- Retention is near-total early on — close to 100% retention for the first 3–6 months, an average tenure of more than three years, and losing less than 20% of staff annually.
- Onboarding is not left to chance — contact centre managers personally speak with new recruits before they start, and training blends classroom and on-the-floor learning.
- Performance is exceptional — a 0% call abandonment rate, an average wait time well under a minute, and first call resolution above 90%.
- Customer satisfaction is the focus — not just of the contact centre, but of the entire organisation.
As the report put it: for a contact centre to consider itself "best practice", it needs to compare favourably with the factors above.
See What Customers Actually Experience
The data in this report is self-reported by contact centres. Since this edition was published, ACXPA has launched the Call Centre Rankings — the only national mystery shopping program that measures what customers actually experience when they call.
Real calls are made every month and scored against the Australian Contact Centre CX Standards across more than 80 metrics, covering accessibility, agent mastery and overall CX.
Get the Full Report
This article is our summary of the key findings. The full 2019 report is produced and owned by Smaart Recruitment and is available from them at contactcentrebestpractice.com.au.
The data tells you what. These tell you what to do about it.
Benchmarks are only useful if they change something. These are the two places ACXPA members go to act on them.
🎯 The Call Centre Hub
Standards, benchmarking, workforce management, coaching, complaints and training — the complete operational toolkit for running a modern call centre, in one place.
🗣️ Call Centre Roundtables
Practitioner-led sessions where contact centre leaders work through the issues in this report — attrition, absenteeism, AI, rostering — with people facing exactly the same problems.
Find the partners behind high-performing contact centres
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