Call center stress is perhaps the most common obstacle that site managers and owners have to overcome, but this doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve. Whether it’s for customer service, sales, technical assistance or collections, working in a call center is extremely demanding. Besides having to handle a large number of interactions, call center agents also have to meet various quality metrics while de-escalating incidents with unhappy callers on a regular basis.
But, even though most call center agents experience work-related stress at some point, this issue is hard to prevent because all sites are different. As a manager or call center owner, you need to identify the elements that induce the most stress in your employees and figure out how to reduce these in order to help your agents.
At Autopilot Reviews, we specialize in helping call centers deliver feedback to agents directly from customers in real-time. Our team is familiar with stress in call centers and how it can impact employee performance, so we understand the importance of finding solutions to this issue.
In this article, we will go over the definition of stress in the call center context, discuss the common stressors, and provide solutions to help managers reduce employee anxiety across the board.
What Is Call Center Stress?
In simple terms, call center stress is the result of a work environment that puts agents under too much pressure. In this context, stress refers to negative emotions and feelings that are induced by unfavorable work situations, such as constantly taking calls from angry customers or failing to meet quality metrics that are too demanding.
As with other types, the stress in call centers can result in a collection of disadvantages for both agents and their managers. When under work stress, agents are likely to experience negative emotions before, during, and after their shifts. At the same time, stressed agents are also more likely to underperform and clash with customers, which can bring additional issues for site owners and managers.
In addition to not meeting the call center quality assurance, agents who are under extreme stress also tend to have a higher number of unexcused absences and are harder to train because of their lack of enthusiasm. The worst part is that continued exposure to stress in call centers can result in agent burnout, which is the breaking point for most employees.
Defining Call Center Burnout
If your agents are constantly exposed to high levels of anxiety and stress at work, they will undoubtedly experience call center burnout. In simple terms, agent burnout is a condition that results in a lack of energy, exhaustion, a cynical attitude, and feeling more distant mentally from one’s job.
While many managers understand and accept employee burnout, some are not aware that this is an actual condition that impacts other industries. Research conducted by Gallup suggests that a whopping 76% of call center agents can experience burnout at one point or another. Additionally, findings at Cornell University suggest that many of the employees that experience burnout are also prescribed medication for mental health conditions due exclusively to their work.
10 Common Call Center Stress Affectors
Call centers can vary in size, industry, purpose, and location, which means that every single site is different. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution that allows you to address all stressors at once either. So, you need to understand your agents as well as the stressors that impact them the most to come up with a solid strategy to overcome stress at a large scale.
Remember, taking the time to address stress in your call center brings different advantages and positively impacts your performance metrics. But, you have to make impactful changes and monitor these to ensure that they have the right results.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common stressors that induce stress in call centers.
1. Unclear Responsibilities and Expectations
In the best of cases, your agents’ roles should be clearly defined and fall within one relatively simple scope. However, there are many call centers where agents are expected to wear many hats and complete a variety of different jobs.
While this in itself can be stressful, the issue is amplified when agents are not entirely sure what their responsibilities are and what’s expected of them.
When your agents don’t have defined roles, they are often assigned tasks that they don’t feel comfortable with or don’t have the skills to complete, which sets them up for failure.
To avoid this, you should create a list of all operations positions in your business, including floor agents, Q&A specialists, attendance team members, and the managers from all these departments. Then, list out all of the tasks that have to be completed within your call center. Now, assign tasks to each type of employee based on relevance and create a scope for each position.
Once you have the description of your agent’s duties and expectations, you should share this with your team to make sure you’re all on the same page.
2. Invasive Monitoring
There is no doubt that tracking your agents can produce great results, as long as you use the information collected to improve your operations. However, many call center managers fall into the trap of invasive monitoring. Invasive monitoring is the practice of over-tracking agents, to the point of inducing anxiety and raising stress levels.
Invasive monitoring doesn’t only include The main issue with invasive monitoring is that it comes from within the call center, which creates a barrier between agents and managers. Instead of making agents feel overwhelmed, identify a few metrics that really show how agents are performing and focus on these. This will relieve pressure from your agents while reducing the number of resources you’re investing into monitoring alone.
3. Poor Management
Poor employee management is a common problem in a large number of industries and call centers are no exception. Additionally, poor management is an issue that can occur at any level of the chain of command. So, call centers need to ensure that even lower-level managers have the right training.
Call center managers are responsible for motivating their team members and helping them achieve their goals. Supervisors that manage agents need to keep a close eye on their individual agent as well as team stress levels in order to prevent burnout. Not only this, but managers also have to understand that there are times to motivate your call center employees and other scenarios that require a more supportive approach.
4. Feeling Underappreciated
One of the main reasons why agents experience stress and burnout is a lack of appreciation.
It’s true that agents are doing their job in exchange for a wage, but this isn’t enough to make your workers feel like they are getting treated well. In many cases, call center wages are well below the local average, so if your agents are working hard you should consider rewarding them with a bonus, activity, or employee-centric leisure event.
Another way to boost morale in your call center is to celebrate agent birthdays and local holidays. This shows employees that you’re willing to invest resources to keep them happy and it’s more cost-effective than awarding individual bonuses.
5. A Lack of Adequate Working Conditions or Equipment
While it’s true that call center work will never fall under the same category of “heavy labor,” there is no denying how demanding it can be. For starters, agents are required to sit in an upright position and speak on the phone for three or more hours at a time.
Poor seating can result in back pain while using conventional telephone handsets can become tedious and produce neck as well as wrist pain. Therefore, you need to provide headsets, comfortable seating, relatively new computers, and other pieces of equipment in order to create adequate working conditions.
6. Being Overworked
This stressor is also related to the scope of your agents’ work, but it’s different from having unclear expectations. Overworking your agents means that they have unreasonable schedules, are taking way too many calls per day, or receive too many tasks whenever they are on their shifts.
Taking calls from unhappy customers and making cold calls are extremely stressful tasks, so you should try to find ways to ease your agents’ workloads and provide resources in order to lower stress levels across the board.
7. Overly Rude or Inappropriate Customers
It’s true that call centers and their clients are not responsible for the way customers behave over the phone. However, call centers agents are inevitably exposed to rude or inappropriate behavior on behalf of customers. This becomes a major problem when it occurs on a regular basis because it can exponentially increase stress and unexpectedly lead to agent burnout.
The main challenge with inappropriate customer behavior is that it’s almost impossible to control, especially at the call center level. Besides giving agents the ability to solve simple issues, you also need to provide extensive training to teach them how to de-escalate certain scenarios and handle interactions with annoyed customers.
8. Low Salaries and Absence of Incentives
Remember earlier when we said that call center wages are often below the local average? While this can vary depending on the site location, it’s safe to assume that your call center agents feel like their salaries are too low for the value provided. This is especially true if there is a lack of additional call center incentives like attendance or performance bonuses.
Increasing salaries across the board is always difficult, but call center managers should consider creating a budget for top-performers and developing the goals that agents have to reach to attain these.
9. Call Center Stress Due to Unpredictable Working Hours
It’s common for call centers to be open beyond regular business hours, not to mention the fact that some sites are located in different continents from the countries they serve. This means that some agents have to work past midnight or start working in the early hours of the morning, both of which can result in higher stress levels.
However, the biggest issue with working hours is unpredictability. In other words, if your call center frequently changes employee schedules without warning, you will put your agents under additional stress. Having an unpredictable schedule means that agents can’t make plans to unwind during their time off, which means that their stress will build up at a faster pace.
10. Low-Quality Training Programs
A call center’s training program is designed to provide agents with everything they need to perform their jobs properly. However, some call centers deliver overly basic training that doesn’t equip agents with the tools or knowledge they need.
Low-quality training programs can induce a huge amount of call center anxiety and stress, so you should conduct a survey next time you finish training a class in order to find out if your training program is good enough.
The Benefits of Managing and Relieving Call Center Stress
If left unchecked, call center anxiety can burn out your best agents and drastically affect the performance of your facility. But, if you take the time to develop a stress management strategy, you’ll set up your agents for success and increase your chances of reaching every important metric by the end of each month.
Let’s take a look at some of the specific benefits of managing and relieving call center anxiety.
Lower Overall Stress Levels
The first and most obvious benefit of managing anxiety in call centers is the reduction of stress levels in your agents. This will result in happier, more outgoing agents who are receptive to your training and more likely to deliver a great customer experience. Not only this, but motivated agents are also more likely to reach their performance goals and implement new instructions right away.
Higher Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is crucial because it helps managers identify which agents are receptive and energized at work. Engagement is directly correlated to stress levels, so if you aim to reduce stress and anxiety for your agents, you will see engagement metrics rising across the board.
A Boost in Productivity
The impact of stress on work performance has been studied and documented for some time now. Research suggests that stress actually has a negative correlation to productivity, so agents that experience high levels of anxiety are more likely to have poor performance metrics. But, the opposite is also true, so lowering stress levels for your agents will also boost their productivity as well as the call center’s bottom line.
A Reduction in Employee Turnaround
Employee turnaround is a common challenge, especially for call centers that have high-stress environments. The good news is that you can reduce the number of employees that quit or otherwise stop working at your call center by reducing stress and helping agents cope with anxiety through the right channels.
More Confident and Performance-Focused Employees
Continuous stress doesn’t only impact your agents’ performance, but also the way they evaluate their skills. If your agents are always in stressful situations, they’ll start doubting the knowledge they possess and request assistance even for simple tasks.
The good news is that you can counter this by reducing stress and anxiety in your call center. If your agents operate in a positive environment, they’ll be more confident and focus on performance during every call.
Improved Employee/Customer Satisfaction and a Better Company Culture
Employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction scores are two major metrics that call center managers need to monitor closely. Fortunately, you can improve both of these by reducing employee stress, which yields happier agents that provide a better experience to your customers.
Maintaining low-stress levels for long periods of time doesn’t only help customers as well as employees, but it also establishes a better call center culture where agents feel a responsibility to deliver superb service.
How to Implement Call Center Stress Management Techniques (And Avoid Call Center Anxiety)
With more than three-quarters of all agents experiencing burnout, there is no surprise that this issue can be detrimental to your call center’s performance and bottom line. Luckily, call center managers can make a variety of adjustments that help reduce stress and ensure that their agents have everything they need to provide stellar service.
As we’ve mentioned a couple of times, every single call center is unique. Therefore, you have to evaluate all of the variables that affect your site and create a plan that’s tailored to your unique scenario.
Let’s take a look at some of the steps you need to take to reduce agent stress and anxiety in your call center.
Identify Your Call Center Stress Causes
It’s impossible to come up with a solution for a problem that you don’t understand. Therefore, the very first step to reducing anxiety in your call center is to identify the biggest stressors that impact your agents. Don’t be afraid to ask your agents directly what’s causing them the most stress and create a list of elements you need to address in order of importance.
Create a Plan to Reduce Call Center Stress
Now that you have a clearer understanding of the elements impacting your agent stress levels, it’s time to develop your plan. Keep in mind that some elements are out of your control, but your strategy should include the goals you want to achieve, a detailed description of each step, and a description of how you’ll track your progress.
Provide Specialized Training for Team Leaders
Most instances of burnout occur at the agent level, but team leaders actually have the ability to relieve anxiety and reduce stress. However, to do this, your team leaders need to know how to communicate with agents and motivate your call center agents in order to keep them engaged.
You should provide training to your team leaders to make sure they’re compassionate while also providing everything that agents need to grow and succeed.
Collect Detailed Information About Employee Performance
Besides asking agents directly, one of the best ways to measure stress in call centers is through performance tracking. Conventional tracking platforms provide some insights but if you want to get more granular, you can implement solutions like Autopilot Reviews.
Autopilot Reviews is an innovative platform that allows call centers to collect feedback from customers and provide this feedback to agents in real-time. To find out more about Autopilot Reviews and how it can help your call center, contact us today.
Select and Deploy Stress-Reduction Techniques
From breathing exercises to more flexible scheduling, you should come up with a list of stress-reducing techniques designed specifically for your agents. Rather than implementing all of them at once, you can also test out different alternatives with small groups of agents and measure the results to find the best approach.
Safeguard the Most Valuable Team Members
Burnout usually affects the most valuable team members because they experience the most pressure. But, the problem is that losing your best agents can dramatically hinder the performance of your entire site. Therefore, you should prioritize the top agents to make sure that they are fresh and ready to boost your numbers.
Develop a Better Recruiting Program
Your call center’s recruiting program directly impacts the quality of your agents, and therefore, the levels of stress they experience. If you notice that new agents are experiencing burnout faster than previous classes, you may need to evaluate your recruiting program and make adjustments in order to attract prospects that better fit your program.
Want to Reduce Stress in Your Call Center? Get More Insights Through Autopilot Reviews
Managing agent stress within your call center is a challenging process, but it can bring a wide range of great benefits that boost productivity and increase employee engagement throughout your site. With that said, you also need to understand what the different stressors are and collect information from each interaction to get a good idea of how much stress your agents are experiencing.
Want to find out more about gathering data about each interaction? Autopilot Reviews lets you collect information and provide feedback directly from customers in real-time, so contact us today to learn more.
