How to help contact center agents avoid burnout

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Is burnout gripping your contact center?

A worldwide survey of contact center agents revealed 59 percent are at risk of burnout, including 28 percent who face a severe burnout risk.

Burnout is defined by the American Psychological Association as "physical, emotional, or mental exhaustion accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance, and negative attitudes towards oneself and others."

That spells trouble for contact centers. Agent burnout can lead to:

• Poor customer service

• Chronic absenteeism

• Turnover

The survey investigated what factors made agents more at risk of burning out, and what factors made them more resilient. Agents with the lowest risk of burnout tend to be:

1. Empowered to serve customers

2. Compensated fairly

3. Supported by their boss

The survey examined 15 factors and found a total of 11 were tied to lower burnout risk.

Get the full report.

Burnout study overview

A total of 951 contact center agents participated between January and February 2023. The responses were anonymous. Agents from multiple countries and companies participated.

Participants were first asked to complete a burnout self-assessment provided by MindTools. The assessment generated a burnout risk score on a scale of 15-75:

• 15-32 = Little to no risk of burnout

• 33-49 = At risk of burnout

• 50-75 = Severe risk of burnout

Next, participants were asked 15 questions about their work environment. The topics ranged from the training they received to whether they had a good friend at work.

Of the 15 factors, 11 were correlated with a lower burnout risk.

This was determined by a 10 or more percentage point gap between agents with no burnout risk compared to agents with a severe risk of burnout.

There was some good news.

While 59 percent of agents surveyed were in the at risk or severe risk category, there is some improvement from a similar report from 2016. That study found 74 percent of contact center agents were at risk of burnout.

This post highlights the top three factors that make agents more resilient to burnout. You can download the complete study here.

Top three ways to prevent agent burnout

Having a customer-focused organization is table stakes.

A whopping 94 percent of agents who were not at risk of burnout felt their organization was customer-focused, compared to just 80 percent of severe risk agents.

But becoming customer-focused is a long journey. In my experience, it takes an average of two years. You can get there by following The Service Culture Handbook, and I think you should, but here are three things you can do right now.

1. Empower your agents

Agents at low-risk of burnout are much more likely to feel empowered than agents facing a severe burnout risk.

Empowerment is a process of enabling agents to do good work. It involves giving agents:

• Adequate resources to help customers

• Best practice procedures to be more consistent

• Authority to deviate from normal procedures when it makes sense

I've created a collection of employee empowerment resources to help you empower your team.

2. Pay your agents well

You've probably heard a disgruntled employee say, "They don't pay me enough to deal with this." Okay, you've probably said it at least once or twice yourself.

It turns out that adequate pay helps make agents more resilient.

This isn't too surprising.

Daniel Pink's groundbreaking book on motivation, Drive, revealed employees are generally motivated by three things:

1. Autonomy (see empowerment, above)

2. Mastery

3. Purpose (i.e. working for a customer-focused organization)

There’s a huge caveat to all this research. You have to pay people enough that they don't worry about pay. For most companies, this means above the mid-line.

Zeyenp Ton's excellent book, The Good Jobs Strategy, profiles customer-focused companies like Trader Joe's and Costco. These companies pay their employees well above market, despite having very low prices.

How can this possibly work? Three simple reasons:

1. Access to better talent. The best employees can earn more.

2. Improved results. Better employees, by definition, can do more.

3. Decreased turnover. People are less likely to leave a good job when they're well-paid.

Making the case for giving employees is all above math. Don't worry, I don't enjoy math either, so I wrote this guide to help you make your case.

3. Support your team

Agents who felt they had a supportive boss are much less likely to be at risk of burnout.

A supportive boss makes employees feel like they can succeed. They bring out the best in people, and help their team reach new levels of mastery in their role.

Supportive actions include coaching, encouragement, and even accountability.

Wait, accountability?!

Yep. Accountability isn’t punishment. Holding someone accountable really means giving them responsibility. (Employees like that.)

I won't lie to you. Being a supportive leader is tough. I mean, who’s got your back? Managers often feel stuck between demanding executives and (seemingly) needy employees.

It doesn’t have to be that way, so I've put together a collection of resources to help you get started.

Get the report

Discover 11 factors that make agents more resilient to burnout.

Download

Conclusion

Employees like working for customer-focused companies with great products, especially if they are empowered, paid well, and have a good boss.

You knew that already. Now you have some real data to back it up.

One surprise was about remote agents. People who primarily work from home aren't any more or less resilient to burnout than agents who work primarily onsite.

Strangely, remote agents were more likely to get regular feedback from their boss.

You can download the full report to read even more insights. And if you suspect burnout is a challenge for your contact center, drop me a line and let's talk.

Quickly Fix Agent Performance on the Cheap

Contact center leaders are constantly trying to improve agent performance.

Some solutions are costly. Others are time consuming. Still others require support or expertise that's not readily available.

There are some solutions that are easy. You just need to know where to look.

I reached out to 11 contact center leaders and asked them to share a favorite technique they've used to improve agent performance in some way. The only caveat was the idea had to be implemented with very little time, money, and resources.

Here's what they shared.

Brad Cleveland. Author, speaker, consultant, Brad Cleveland Company, LLC. Twitter: @bradcleveland

Explain the “why” behind schedule adherence, the importance of being “in the right place at the right times.” The relationship between staff and service level is not linear – it’s exponential. Every person has a significant positive impact on wait times—a ripple effect far beyond the contacts they directly handle.

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Greg Collins. Chief Customer Office, SalesLoft. Twitter: @greg_p_collins

Highlight an Agent for great service at your next team meeting, presenting them a funny trophy for their desk (think old bowling trophy from Goodwill). When presenting for the first time, establish the expectation that this is a weekly award, to be pasted by the current recipient to another team member in each subsequent team meeting.

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Nate Brown. Director of Customer Experience, UL EHS Sustainability. Blog: Customer Centric Support. Twitter: @CustomerIsFirst

Top-down training is great, but there is a special magic that takes place when leadership, coaches, and agents are unified using a wonderful resource such as The Effortless Experience and dreaming about how to design a better Customer Experience.  While we’ve most recently utilized a “book club” format, our learning together has also taken the form of DiSC, Strengths Finder, and many more. 

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Jeremy Watkin. Director of Customer Experience, FCR. Blog: Customer Service Life. Twitter: @jtwatkin

Regular, short one on one meetings with agents are useful for a couple reasons. First, they keep your connection with team members strong and are a terrific forum for investing in their continued personal and professional growth. Second, they are a great opportunity to quickly review job performance and regularly set and discuss goals and expectations.

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Jenny Dempsey. Social Media and Customer Experience Manager, NumberBarn. Blog: Customer Service Life. Twitter: @jennysuedempsey

When you give CSRs the opportunity to show gratitude in ways other than just “thanks for calling”, it opens the doors to building unique relationships with your customers. It costs under $100 to create and set up a station in your office with thank you cards, markers, stickers, crayons, stamps and allow your agents to connect with customers on a whole new level.

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Todd Hixson. Director of Workforce Management, VIPdesk Connect. Twitter: @Huskerhix

Schedule adherence is not meant to be perfection, rather trying to maximize opportunity to help customers. Going to break a few minutes early is better than trying to go exactly on time and getting caught on a call. Make a “break window” for your team that is 50% of your AHT helps ensure best chance at best capacity.

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Mathew Patterson. Customer Service Evangelist, Help Scout. Twitter: @mrpatto

I struggled to get the team to consistently do a ‘review’ task that was important but never urgent. I had an engineer spend 15 minutes on a live ‘leaderboard’ that showed who had and had not done their weekly reviews. Making the tasks more visible and very mildly competitive was enough to change the behavior of the team almost immediately.

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Jeremy Hyde. Customer Care Manager and Vendor Oversight, UCare. Twitter: @JeremyHyde_

I believe in finding ways to lead by example. Walk the talk. Example, if you are looking to improve the quality of your customer experiences find a way to demonstrate what that looks and sounds like. I’ve done this by having my team listen to and audit my calls or listen in on escalations that I took over.

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Jacob Shields. Call Center Manager, CCI Systems. Twitter: @jacobshields20

Team leads listening to live calls while they work on other tasks. This allows them to pick-up on the tone of a call before it may become a concern or escalation. This allows them to coach an agent live, follow-up with them afterward on improvements, or let them know of their outstanding job!

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Beth Gauthier-Jenkin. Vice President, Customer Care, Gopher Sport. Twitter: @GauthierBeth

Ensure people understand the Purpose, Process, and Payoff of missed performance standards. Learning improves when people understand why they are asked to do something (purpose). Performance improves when we show them how to do it (process). If we can demonstrate how strong performance serves customers and supports their individual success, motivation increases because they see value (payoff).

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David Perry. Customer Support Manager, Clio — Legal Practice Management. Twitter: @davidjp87

Empowered agents are engaged ones. We encourage our staff to seek out opportunities beyond their day jobs that help them grow. However, they must nail their day-jobs first and foremost. They are driven to maintain high standards of productivity, because they are rewarded with work that will develop them further. This drives performance and grows the organization.

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Additional Resources

Download the Quick Fix Checklist to diagnose many common challenges.

You can find even more tips to quickly fix agent performance with this training video on LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com.

You'll need either a LinkedIn Premium subscription or a Lynda account to view the full course. Here's a 30-day trial to Lynda if you don't already have one.

Report: Most Contact Center Agents At Risk of Burnout

We've all seen the signs.

A contact center agent starts developing some bad habits. You can hear a negative tone of voice. Absenteeism increases. Productivity declines while errors go up. You may even see an alarming lack of caring.

The agent's spark has been extinguished. Your agent seems to be burned out.

You're not alone if you've seen this happen. A new study conducted by Toister Performance Solutions reveals that 74 percent of contact center agents are at risk of burnout. 

A whopping 30 percent of agents face a severe burnout risk. 

Burnout Problems

The U.S. National Library of Medicine provides this definition:

Burnout is a psychological term that refers to long-term exhaustion and diminished interest in work.

According to their website, symptoms include:

• Emotional exhaustion

• Alienation from job-related activities

• Reduced performance

These are all potentially harmful issues. Emotional exhaustion can make it difficult to project friendliness and caring to customers. Alienation from job-related activities might mean an agent gives less effort and rarely goes the extra mile. The result of all that is reduced performance.

You may even seen a spike in absenteeism when an agent begins to burn out before they finally leave. Or worse, they stay, but as a shell of their former selves.

Study Results Revealed

The study results are now available in a new research report. Here are a few highlights:

• 52% of agents who are at severe risk of burnout said their company is not customer-focused.

• 41% of agents who are at severe risk of burnout said they don't feel empowered.

• 36% of agents with a severe burnout risk think their co-workers don't provide outstanding service.

Your Phone Agents' Unexpected Self-Service Problem

Scott hadn't logged into the phones all day.

He was behind on too many open support tickets. They were all nasty, too. None of those easy password reset questions that he used to get.

James, Scott's co-worker, was feeling the pressure on the phone. Customers were angry about long hold times and he was doing his best to keep up. Every call seemed to be a long one.

Trudy, another co-worker, was frustrated too. She just took a call that lasted five minutes, but she knew most of her co-workers would need 30 minutes for the same issue.

She would have loved to share her knowledge with her colleagues, but there hadn't been any time lately. Everyone was neck-deep in tricky tickets.

This is a common challenge. Phone contacts are getting more complicated and that's taking more time. Agents and contact centers aren't always prepared. 

I reached out to some of the top analysts covering the contact center industry to find out what's going on. They all point to an unexpected culprit: self-service.

Here's why, and what you can do about it.

Phone Calls Are Changing

Years ago, customer service phone calls varied widely. 

Many calls would be simple transactions. A billing inquiry, a password reset, or a status check on an online order. Today, customers can handle all of those transactions themselves online or via an app.

According to Roy Atkinson, a principal with Clifton Butterfield, LLC, the situation drives customers' decision to call: "The more complex the issue—from the customer’s perspective—the more likely the customer will be to want to talk to a human."

Atkinson points to this data from the American Express Global Customer Service Barometer:

Source: American Express Global Customer Service Barometer

John Goodman, Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, agrees: 

"Telephone service is not going away and in some aspects is becoming more critical. This is because when an issue becomes serious, customers pick up the phone. Our 2015 National Rage Study found that for their most serious problems, customers go to the phone 72% of the time, more than six times as often as going to email or social media (11%)."

The Customer Impact

A 2015 study by Mattersight revealed that only 28 percent of customers use the phone as their first attempt to solve a problem.

A separate 2015 study, this one by Microsoft and Parature, found that 57 percent of customers first go online to try to resolve a problem on their own. They only call when that fails. This makes the phone agent's job even tougher.

Ian Jacobs, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, put it this way:

"Because the customers have already tried to self-serve and failed, they are already somewhat frustrated when they reach an agent. The agent starts two steps back at the word hello."

Indeed, Mattersight reported that 66 percent of customers are frustrated before they even speak to a phone agent. Part of it is the problem itself. Justin Robbins, Group Community Director for HDI & ICMI, points to another issue causing frustration:

"The typical customer journey is taking them across multiple channels, and all too frequently captures information in multiple disparate systems. When these customers finally make their way to a phone rep, it’s often a fragmented, complicated mess."

This customer frustration ends up making calls take even longer. Last year, I discovered research that showed angry customers are more judgmental and less open to ideas. That makes those customers even harder for your phone reps to serve.

How to Help Your Phone Reps

There are a few things you can do to help your phone reps.

The first is to make it easier for customers to get the help they need. Robbins suggests that organizations need to do a better job of anticipating customer needs:

"Organizations are in control of their processes and have the ability to map and affect the customer journey. If leaders are truly concerned about an increase in the complexity of service, they’ll take the necessary steps to create better and more simple service models."

Goodman had this specific suggestion:

"If your website homepage anticipated and answered the top six issues customers call about, you would see at least a 30% drop in calls on those subjects. Most home pages are 90% devoted to marketing when at least 80% of visitors are existing customers trying to get assistance. The allocation of real estate is exactly backwards."

You can also give your agents phone-specific customer service training, such as this course on Lynda.com. (You can drop my name to get a 10-day trial account.)

Finally, make sure you equip your agents with tools like knowledge bases to help them quickly find the answers to tough issues. If one agent can solve an issue in 5 minutes, there's no reason why it should take other agents 30 minutes to get through the same call.