3 Tips for Extinguishing Agent Burnout Before It Starts
How to reduce burnout in contact centre agents for happier employees and better service.
Burnout in the contact centre can be destructive to agent productivity, the contact centre culture and overall quality of customer service.
With phones ringing off the hook, disgruntled customers and the high level of responsibility for customer satisfaction, it should come as no surprise that contact centres are environments of notoriously high tensions.
In fact, CEO of Sensory Intelligence Consulting Annemarie Lombard told health24 that “up to a fifth of call centre staff become over-sensitized to the environment.”
But in order to deliver the highest caliber of customer service, agents must be kept in high spirits and burnout should be avoided at all costs.
Identifying burnout in contact centre agents is a helpful first step in reversing the process, but what can managers do to extinguish burnout and pull agents back into a place of positivity and motivation?
Use these three expert tips to help agents say goodbye to burnout before it escalates:
1. Improve the Hiring Process
Improving your hiring process can not only bring in potential motivated employees that may inspire your existing ones, but also helps ensure that you carefully supply your team with individuals who appear unlikely to burn out quickly.
While burnout is often an effect of environment, certain people are also more inclined to burn out than others.
Watch out for some red flags, such as a track record of repeatedly changing jobs within a year or less, unstable living conditions or a history of emotional unrest.
Once you’ve decided to hire someone, it’s your responsibility to prepare them for success in any way that you can. Some managers assign new hires a project for which they can most likely “hit it out of the ball park,” so to say. This can provide a nice boost to your new employee’s self-esteem, motivating them to take pride in their work.
2. Set Clear Job Descriptors, Goals and Standards
There are few things more frustrating to employees than feeling unclear on what their responsibilities are, being given inconsistent responsibilities or held to subjective or abstract standards.
From day one, agents should have a clear understanding of their duties in the contact centre. If managers wish to alter part of the job description by adding a new responsibility, treat it as a trade-off rather than a gratuitous add-on.
Assign the new responsibility in place of an existing one, or offer a bonus upon completion of the new assignment. This can help prevent agents feeling as if they’re being cheated by performing additional tasks for no benefit.
Likewise, if managers meet with employees to set out performance goals, ensure that the goals are objective, achievable and measurable.
Rather than something abstract, like, “Try to provide better customer service,” aim for something measurable, such as, “Increase your rates of first contact resolution.”
This way, agents have a clear understanding of how to reach their goal.
3. Cultivate a Coaching Culture
You may be surprised at how many managers don’t practice this one fundamental aspect of motivation in the contact centre: coaching.
To cultivate a coaching culture, managers should strive to empower their employees with autonomy and positive recognition. Give feedback on a regular basis to reward improving or high-performing agents, as well as to provide ideas for growth to under-performing or disheartened agents.
Observe individual agents first-hand to gain an understanding of their general work habits, work ethic and areas of strengths and weaknesses. Then use this information as fuel for praising a job well done and setting reasonable goals in areas that need improvement.
By hiring the right team to start with, managers can set up the contact centre with motivated agents who understand and believe in the need for outstanding customer service.
Setting clear job descriptors and goals can avoid potential burnout further down the road by ensuring that agents understand their responsibilities. Finally, cultivating a coaching culture in the contact centre makes the workplace a space for growth and achievement rather than the stagnation and fatigue characteristic of burnout.
For more information on how to extinguish agent burnout before it begins, download our free white paper.
