5 Ways to Reduce Burnout in Your Contact Center

Do you often find unexpectedly high absenteeism and irregularity of working hours from agents or staff at your contact center? Is the count of escalations, customer complaints, inter-team quarrels growing exponentially? It’s high-time when you need to realize that the contact center is undergoing a burnout.

Why do stressful situations occur?

Offering customer experience is not an easy task. To delight a customer, the interaction appears a task of 2-3 minutes but requires a lot of patience and background work. Here, an agent needs to fetch customer information, confirm interaction history, create a wrap-up summary and more. The growing pressure eventually turns into a burnout, a real threat to the contact center team. Further, negatively impacting your business and customer experience. According to a survey by Deloitte on burnout, more than 70% of the employees said that they have experienced burnout in their jobs. It takes a lot of effort into hiring valuable talent. So, try retaining them with the following ways that will reduce the agent’s burnout in the contact center.

1. Distribution of load

The human brain sitting at a contact center i.e. agent needs to absorb a lot of information and supply useful content to customers. With large call volumes, this task becomes tedious and tiring. Resulting in disappointed agents and customers. This is also elevated because of the untrained agents who fail to receive required support because of the work pressure. Further, the business sees a higher level of attrition rate of employees.

This calls for the distribution of load from agents to other support channels such as IVR, SMS, mobile apps, specific portals and more. An intelligent call routing helps customers undergo self-support and reduce the number of calls directly coming to the agent. Even the agent can be prepared for the incoming call when they are aware of the routing.

2. Unified information display

In addition to the distribution of load, agents need to switch multiple screens and numerous times, to fetch the required information. This task consumes valuable 15-20 secs of agents during each call, thereby increasing call handle time and making customers stay on hold for a longer period. The absence of in-built gadgets further reduces their efficiency. And, not getting a preferred desktop interface increases the frustration level of agents.

To deal with such a scenario, your contact center needs to have an optimized agent desktop that offers seamless integration with 3rd party apps. This saves agents from switching multiple screens to fetch customer information and interaction history, thereby improving call resolution. Further, industry-specific agent desktop will display the required fields for interacting with customers.

3. Staff management

The pressure at the contact center is an unsaid truth. Agents constantly deal with problems faced by customers, inter-team issues, technical glitches and more. And, during seasonal demands or lower staff constraints, agents undergo immense pressure and frustration. At times the high performers are put under relentless demands that can be highly damaging. This might further affect the behavior of agents with the team and customers.

In such situations, monetary benefits are not enough, staff needs appreciation and recognition for the hard work. There should be a compassion element to replace stress. Make sure high call volume does not become an everyday pressure for people. Hire a required number of agents, else, stress will soon change into resignations. Get over the free food service to deal with such situations. The staff is smart enough to understand their good or bad and is not affected by such petitions.

4. Implementation of processes and rules

Adding new processes and rules might appear enticing to you but following them and implementing it in an ongoing procedure can be problematic for your contact center agents and staff members. Such things can affect the performance and lower the efficiency of agents. If the rules appear dictatorship driven then a steep decline in enthusiasm will be highly visible leading to exhaustion even in conditions with lower work pressure.

You need to get serious on measuring the adherence of your staff and how comfortable they accept changes. Pressurizing to follow rules should be within the threshold level of agents. It should never be an activity occurring during the times when the team is already burning out because of work pressure. Make sure your activities do not force valuable resources to leave the organization.

5. Staff engagement and trust-building

Focus to be a great leader and just a manager. Your agents and staff members should grow trust in you and the business. Hear out agents’ suggestions and opinions to get a solution. With morale-support try offering technical support that can ease their work, such as providing an agent scripting tool that offers a series of guided scripts and saves agents from fumbling. Be on the same platform with the team to have an agreed solution. Try to stay involved in everything to make agents feel valued but monitor your engagement. Daily or weekly meetings can be of help.

To wrap up, mitigate issues and stressful situations before business undergoes a downfall. Cover all aspects from emotional backing to technical support and manage demands for healthy operations to deliver excellent customer service with delighted agents. Keep your staff high-spirited even during seasonal pressure with engagement activities or gamified wallboards and more.