According to the Merchants International Benchmarking Report, the top 10 most pressing managerial issues for call centre managers are, in rank order:

1. Improving service quality / customer experience.
2. Improving service levels.
3. Optimising the use of available resources.
4. Becoming more efficient.
5. Recruiting quality staff.
6. Becoming more proactive / selling.
7. Maintaining motivation / developing culture.
8. Retaining staff.
9. Using data / information more effectively.
10. Improving query resolution rates.

As you can see, staff related issues do not figure high in the rankings.  Interestingly, recruiting quality staff ranks higher than retaining staff - paradoxical, when you consider the costs of recruitment and training.

Over 20% of US call centres ranked maintaining motivation / developing culture as their number one.  This may mean either that the US has considerably more people issues or that they are more focused on these key issues.