It's not easy to hide your feelings.
My friend Jenny Dempsey wrote a personal and poignant post about this on her blog. Her beloved dog, Miso, had died and she was finding it difficult to hide her grief at work.
That's exactly what her job required her to do.
Jenny was a customer care manager at DMV.org. Her legendarily warm and bubbly customer service inspires songs from customers. That's what makes her so good at her job, where displaying warmth and friendliness towards customers is expected.
Suddenly, this was very difficult.
How do you bring a warm, bubbly personality to work when you don’t feel that way? As Jenny wrote, grief isn’t often welcome in customer service: “We’re expected to stuff those feelings down and get to work.”
Many customer service professionals do just that. They engage in surface acting, where they pretend to be happy and friendly even when they’re not.
This takes an incredible toll. Surface acting can cause poor customer service, decreased job satisfaction, and burnout. Here's what you need to know and what you can do about it.
What is surface acting?
Surface acting is a technique where you display an emotion that you don't actually feel. For example, here are some emotional displays typically required of customer service employees:
Smiling
Warm tone of voice
Positive and open body language
Those are all easy to display when you actually feel happy.
Surface acting is when you don't feel happy but force yourself to smile anyway. This gets increasingly harder the bigger the gap between how you feel and the emotions you put on display.
Expending this kind of emotional labor is exhausting.
What is emotional labor?
Emotional labor is the effort required to engage in surface acting. The term emotional labor was first coined by Arlie Hochschild in her book, The Managed Heart.
Like any type of effort, exerting too much can be exhausting.
Think about a time when you were feeling ill at work. Perhaps you had a headache, congestion, or something else that made you feel miserable. Now, try to remember how hard it was to smile and act friendly with customers.
That effort is emotional labor.
Why aren’t customer service employees friendly?
A neighbor recently complained to me about poor customer service he experienced while dining with his niece in a restaurant. His server wasn't friendly and he and his niece came to the conclusion that the server should be fired.
My neighbor can be a bit surly, so I can only imagine what a gem he must have been as a restaurant guest. It's an incredible challenge to serve someone with a smile who regarded you with such disdain that they would callously suggest you should lose your job.
Unsympathetic, demanding customers are a big drain on emotional labor, especially when people like this test our natural fight or flight instinct. I have the luxury of politely ending the conversation with my neighbor when he gets too grumpy. A restaurant server must stick with it and act happy.
Customer service employees face other challenges, too.
You might be grieving, like my friend Jenny, or just be having a bad day. Perhaps you dislike your coworkers, your boss, or even your customers. You might be tired of defending a defective product or a dumb policy.
Many customer service professionals don’t get paid enough. While intellectual and physical skills are highly valued, studies show you don't make a lot of money just for being good at taking crap from other people.
Unpredictable schedules can also make outside of work difficult.
This incredible New York Times article (subscription required) profiled a young single mother who tried to balance school and child care while dealing with a work schedule that could change from week-to-week or even day to day.
It's no surprise that retailers came under investigation by several states for requiring employees to be on-call for work without getting paid.
How does emotional labor affect service?
There are many ways that emotional labor impact service.
The obvious one is employees simply get tired. Expending too much emotional labor is one of the biggest reasons why customer service employee struggle to be friendly.
Researcher Alicia Grandey at Penn State University discovered a strong link between surface acting and low job satisfaction. She also found a clear link to emotional exhaustion.
This may explain why my own study found that 74 percent of contact center agents are at risk of burnout.
The tangible impact of all of these problems is lower customer satisfaction, lower employee engagement, and higher turnover.
What Can You Do About It?
On a personal level, it's up to each employee to find his or her own happiness. One exercise you can try is called the Attitude Anchor.
For customer service managers, the solution isn't another incentive program or some other short-term fix. It's also not an annual employee engagement survey, which is usually a waste of time. Your challenge is to create a work environment where employees can actually be happy.
You need a plan. Try creating your own road map by using this simple assessment or let me help you with a comprehensive, full-service version.
Above all, give your employees something to smile about.