Stress about your KPIs, about meeting schedules, about your sales goals, about people shouting at your headphones. Call center jobs can be exhausting due to high call volume, repetitive tasks, strict metrics, and dealing with angry or demanding customers. Pressure to meet objectives and maintain a high level of customer service can contribute to general fatigue. Among the most common causes are repetitive and high-volume calls, excessive time pressure, having annoying customers all day long, lack of clarity about job functions or conflicting objectives, and lack of adequate tools or assistance.
For call center agents, this stress is due to demanding performance quotas, difficult customer interactions, long working hours, and little control over high workloads. Sometimes, agents struggle to cope mentally, emotionally and physically with the high level of stress that often accompanies their work in a call center. This struggle, which can lead to exhaustion, is also known as “call center stress syndrome.” Research indicates that call center agents experience higher levels of burnout than workers in many other industries. Call center agents must deal with a wide range of customer complaints and problems on a daily basis, which can be exhausting and mentally draining.
In particular, call centers can be stressful places to work, and your employees aren't well represented in the conversation about burnout. Virtual call center employees must adapt to an avalanche of new communication tools and business software. Managers can play an influential role in helping to minimize the causes of stress in the call center environment by keeping an eye on the behavior and attitude of their employees and address potential stressors. Because call centers rely heavily on tracking KPIs, managers can easily comprehensively track employees beyond relevant KPIs, creating an environment where employees feel overwhelmed.
Perhaps the biggest impact on a company due to call center stress syndrome is low customer satisfaction. To further improve the agent experience, call center managers can also implement flexible schedules and shifts, recognize and reward agent performance, and foster a culture of open communication and feedback. Transparency in career paths builds trust in the management team and gives call center agents something to fight for in the midst of all the chaos. With contact centers that operate remotely, managers may not notice when front-line staff are struggling.
Whether inbound or outbound, in an office or at home, call center agents are easily susceptible to burnout. A company's contact center software increases stress by rotating between various tools and data sources. Call center employees are often in an unsustainable position as the first line of response when dealing with customers. Recent studies have shown that 74% of contact center agents are considered to be at risk of burnout, and that 30% of agents are at serious risk of burnout.
Prioritizing empathy as a company objective is a good starting point, but a call center manager may not be in anyone's hands. However, when call center representatives feel that their work, knowledge, and time are respected, they are less likely to burn out.
