Frontline voice work has some of the highest churn of any job globally, but South Africa’s growing pipeline of young, first-time workers don’t need to face that reality the same way – or with the same mental health burdens.
By Bruce Von Maltitz, CEO of 1Stream
South Africa’s global business services outsourcing (BPO) sector created 26 346 jobs serving international markets in 2025, its strongest year since 2018, according to Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA), the industry body. Close to nine in 10 of those jobs went to people under 35, the group facing the country’s highest unemployment rate.
Voice-based contact centre work made up 71% of those new positions. Globally, contact centre attrition runs between 30% and 45% a year, roughly three times the rate of most other sectors, according to the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC). South Africa competes on offshore voice floors where ContactBabel puts that average rate higher, between 45% and 60%.
Currently, fewer than one centre in 20 holds turnover below 15% globally – South Africa is perfectly positioned to represent that one-in-20 figure. The operators that win and keep international contracts are usually the ones that hold churn down, which turns retention into a commercial and human advantage in an economy that uniquely values both.
Ask an agent what wears them down and you hear about the calls nobody wants, long before you hear about pay. The fifth debt-collection call of the morning, where the person swears and hangs up before the greeting is finished. The verification script read word for word, fifty times before lunch. Getting through that takes stamina, and the people we ask for it are mostly in their first year of formal work.
Those are the calls to point AI voice agents at: the routine verification and account queries, the opening minutes of a hard call, before any judgement is needed. We build ours to hand off the second a caller raises fraud or real distress, because a script has no business in that conversation. What stays with the agent is the negotiation, and the call where a customer needs someone who can say yes.
AI does not fix retention on its own, of course. Pay and management matter more than tools, and an operator using automation to paper over a struggling work culture will still lose people. But a sector hiring at this pace is paying to train people it often risks losing inside a year, and taking the least survivable calls off the floor is one lever an operator can pull without waiting for anyone else.
BPESA puts roughly three in 10 of the sector’s hires in households where nobody else earns a wage, and has set a target of 350 000 to 500 000 cumulative jobs by 2030. Those jobs build careers if the people in them last past the first year.
Handing the worst of the queue to a machine keeps more agents on the floor long enough to become the team leaders the next intake will learn from.