Explore fresh, expert perspectives on customer engagement and innovation

We’re pleased to announce a key new appointment to our senior team following an unprecedented period of growth!

In 2021 our rapid growth saw us become one of the fastest-growing contact centre specialists in the country. We saw record sales across the year, with a 45% growth in subscription revenue in 2021, while we also doubled our headcount from 30 to 60 staff.  We were also named one of the North’s top 50 fastest growing tech companies in the Northern Tech Awards 2021.

Matt Yates joins the business as VP of Engineering to lead the tech team in developing innovative new solutions and create a market-leading customer engagement platform, as well as discovering new areas for business growth. Matt brings over 20 years industry experience growing and developing engineering departments, most notably for Ivanti (formerly AppSense), where he helped grow the company from £20m – £100m in annual revenue in just five years.

Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact said: “My co-founders and I set up MaxContact because we saw first-hand the frustrations organisations experienced in this industry with solutions over-promising and under-delivering on features, support and resilience. With Matt at the helm of our engineering team, I’m excited to see us develop even more features and technologies that continue to improve the lives of people that interact through engagement platforms.

“We have big dreams to continue our rapid growth and transform the industry in 2022 and beyond and with people like Matt on board, we’ll continue to make the business be a force for good not only for our people and our organisation, but for the wider industry.”

Matt Yates, VP of Engineering at MaxContact, said: “It’s fantastic to be joining MaxContact at such an exciting time for the business. I’m really passionate about using technology to help people find better ways of working, which chimes well with the values at the heart of the business. The team they’ve built is really special and I’m looking forward to bringing my experience in enterprise IT to help continue growing the company into an industry leading scale-up, all by putting people first.”

Find out more about MaxContact, here.

The harsh reality of working within a customer-facing role is the abuse you may receive, sometimes on a daily basis. Physical or verbal abuse towards shop workers and call centre agents has long been an issue plaguing those in customer service roles, but during the pandemic, the number of incidents increased significantly.

With customers stuck at home, call queues becoming longer and many people struggling financially as a result of COVID-19, workers experienced the brunt of this frustration. The Institute of Customer Service revealed that in 2021, 60% of customer-service workers experienced hostility across the year, ranging from shouting and swearing to racial abuse, death threats, spitting and physical attacks.  

As businesses get into the swing of 2022, abuse to customer-facing staff cannot fall under the radar. With energy prices soaring in April and the nation already gripped in a cost-of-living crisis that is causing anxiety for people up and down the country, abuse and hostility will likely rise further for the workers on the receiving end.  

The cost-of-living crisis will already be putting unreported pressure on customer service workers who are dealing with angry or upsetting calls about rising costs. These employees are the forgotten workers of this crisis and in the coming months action needs to be taken to protect them long-term, not just during high periods of stress.  

This won’t be an easy fix, but the industry needs sustained commitments through initiatives, tools and policies that demonstrably support these workers’ wellbeing.

Protecting your workers’ wellbeing

Many customer-facing workers are reporting that their organisations have policies to try and help support their mental health. Yet our research revealed that whilst nearly all workers know about these mental health policies, just 32% said their leaders and managers follow them ‘all the time’. This suggests that while policies have been created, more could be done to ensure they are being implemented across the board.

There is no longer room for complacency here, businesses need to transform their working practices to put the wellbeing of frontline customer service staff at the heart of everything they do.  

Actively promoting the wellbeing of these workers and ensuring this forms part of your organisation’s culture is key. Whether you’re working from home or back in the office, one thing you should consider is encouraging staff to take regular breaks between calls or busy periods and setting up frequent check-ins to allow your teams room to breathe and break up busy workloads. Training managers to identify early signs of burnout and providing mental health support is key to help improve staff wellbeing before it’s too late.

Another way of improving morale is by championing the value they bring to the business and the softer skills they possess. Customer-serving workers are extremely skilled and celebrating their accomplishments as well as showing them a clear path to progression will help them see their job as fulfilling and a long-term career.  

This isn’t just the moral thing to do. Putting employees’ mental health, wellbeing and development first means happy customers will follow. After all, you can’t have great customer experience without happy and engaged employees.  

Rebalancing employee experience with customer satisfaction  

It’s clear that, especially in the struggle for business survival during the pandemic, companies have been used to putting the customer first. Businesses have long operated in this way, rules such as ‘the customer comes first’ and the ‘customer is always right’ have defined businesses for years. Obviously, this is simple business sense and will help drive revenue, loyalty and growth. It’s therefore easy to fall into the trap of constantly prioritising customers. However, if businesses don’t urgently fix the balance between customer satisfaction levels and investment in staff wellbeing, we will all suffer.

This year employee experience must become just as important as the customer experience. As prices continue to soar, many businesses will be focused on keeping their customers happy but considering the needs of your employees goes hand-in-hand with this. It isn’t a case of choosing between the customer or your employees, it’s focusing on how these elements work together in tandem. Making sure your employees have the tools and the support in place to deliver excellent customer service will ensure your staff aren’t burned out and your business thrives.

Tech support  

Many organisations have already invested in specialist customer engagement technology to help customer-facing workers do their job to a high standard. This extra support is now more important than ever to reduce burdening workloads.

Automating responses to simple queries and repetitive tasks can be instrumental in protecting workers from frustration and burnout. Using automation at early points in your customer journeys, through features such as chatbots, can help remove mundane tasks and make agents’ lives infinitely easier.

This will ensure that employees mainly deal with high-level and complex interactions which demonstrate real business value, which is more likely to deliver job satisfaction. At the same time, chatbots can dramatically improve a customer’s experience by providing quick and easy answers to simple questions.

Automating quality assurance is another example of technology being used to improve employee experience. Rather than managers trawling through hours of call recordings to check how workers are performing, speech analytics can automate the process by flagging calls with certain trigger words or negative sentiment. Managers are then able to hone in on these specific calls to provide further training or spot when employees might be facing a high volume of angry, abusive calls.  

In the coming months, employee wellbeing must become more than ticking boxes or window dressing. Customer-facing workers are already at breaking point after months of being overworked and underappreciated.

The reality is 72% of customer-facing workers say they are ‘burnt out’ or will be burnt out imminently, rising to 83% of those working in contact centres. Businesses must act now to support these workers who are on the verge of collapse and could be tipped over as a result of the extra pressures of the cost-of-living crisis.

Customer-facing staff are the cornerstone of every good business, let’s give them the support they deserve.

This blog was written by Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, for mycustomer.com. View the original piece here.

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A recent survey of nearly 20,000 employers around the world found that almost 70% of businesses are having trouble hiring new employees, which is the highest level in 15 years.

In the face of such a challenging recruitment climate, the contact centre industry is in a particularly tough position. Attrition in the UK industry – the rate at which people leave their jobs every year – has been above 20% on average for almost two decades.

That is one person in five leaving their contact centre job every year. And that 20 year average may even understate the current situation, with one US study suggesting 40% of agents plan on leaving roles within the next 12 months.

Such high rates of attrition translate into substantial costs for employers.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development outlines where the costs come from.

The most obvious ones are:

• Administration of the resignation
• Recruitment and selection costs
• Induction training for the new employee

Hidden costs are more difficult to calculate but more serious in the long term and include the drop in productivity of new employees relative to experienced staff who have left.

Faced with these challenges, how should contact centre operators go about getting new staff and keeping existing ones?

Why is contact centre recruitment and retention getting even harder?

There is a widespread perception that contact centres can be a demanding environment to work in, particularly for agents. This has a knock-on effect on recruitment, with recent UK research confirming that “Entry level roles such as customer service agents and claims handlers are the most difficult roles to fill”

If entry level roles are difficult to recruit for, operators are then hit with the double-whammy of a high turnover of staff. Many of the reasons are longstanding and well-known, including a perceived lack of career progression.

The shift to remote working in response to the pandemic has added another complication when trying to understand and reduce staff turnover, because younger workers, who are among the most likely to apply for entry level jobs, can be the ones with most to gain from being in an office environment.

The youngest workers, so-called Generation Z (born after 1997), which includes recent school and university leavers, are the cohort who most want to spend time with colleagues and whose mental health is most likely to be affected by the potential isolation of home working, according to IPSOS research.

Isolation from colleagues due to remote working can also have a negative effect on training and staff development.

A high turnover rate of staff can quickly become a never ending cycle. Research has highlighted that:

• 70% of employees say a friend at work is crucial to job satisfaction.
• 50% said it gives them a stronger connection to their workplace. When an employee leaves, the chances are that their closest workmates will follow them.

Recruiting great contact centre staff

It’s not enough to post vacancies on a few jobs sites and wait for the CVs to roll in. Recruitment strategies have to be proactive, and mix and match different approaches.

How will you stand out from other local employers and reach people who might not yet be considering a job as an agent?

A fresh pair of eyes

There are specialist contact centre recruitment agencies. Why not invite one or two of them in for a meeting, or, more likely these days, invite them to an online meeting, and hear how they interpret the challenge?

Highlight progression opportunities

One of the main reasons contact centre agents give for quitting is the lack of progression opportunities. However, the contact centre industry does promote from within, and managers who started as agents are not uncommon. Why not tell those stories? Not only are team leader and manager roles often filled by former agents, but there are other parts of the business that agents can move into.

Turn a perceived weakness into a strength

Contact centres are often seen as stopgap jobs, but if progression opportunities are properly highlighted, then that can become a strength. Not everyone knows what they want to do after school or university, and a job as an agent is a way to step straight into the world of work, with on-the-job training from the start and a chance to weigh up other roles in the same organisation.

Flexible working, for those who want it

Working from home has become a fact of life during the pandemic, with two-thirds of operators supporting a combination of remote and on-site working in summer 2021. While flexible working will help you attract and retain staff overall, be aware that it is less of an incentive for younger workers.

Values matter for younger workers

In 2025, the youngest workers, Generation Z, will make up 27% of the workforce. Business magazine Forbes reports that these new workers are more value driven than their predecessors when considering which companies they want to work for.

[Listen] Aligning Culture and Organisational Strategy to Nurture Employee Engagement with Danny Wareham >

Tactics for reducing staff turnover

Once you have found and recruited great people, you want them to stay. Here are some of the ways you can reduce staff turnover.

Ask people why?

The best way to keep people is to find out why they leave. Conduct exit interviews,

and make it as easy as possible for people to be honest, even if you might not like what you hear. That means the exit interview shouldn’t be conducted by the agent’s line manager, and you should make it clear that the answers won’t affect future references.

Make sure people know how they can progress and learn

Is it clear to agents how they can progress within the organisation? Do they know what is expected of them in order to be considered for new roles? Do they have opportunities to upskill? Make this clear to staff members in order to give them a clear path and something to work towards.

Giving agents opportunities to increase their knowledge and learn new things is vital. A programme of regular training achieves two goals. It helps staff to be more successful, and it shows them that you take their career progression seriously. In an uncertain world, skills are an employee’s insurance against obsolescence. Help agents attain new levels of competence and they won’t feel the need to find them elsewhere.

[Watch] How to improve staff wellbeing and engagement in your contact centre >

Team building

Employees feeling part of a team is one of the signs of a company with high retention rates. Team building can begin on day one for new employees with a well thought through onboarding process. As new agents settle into their careers, team building should continue. This means making people feel valued and enhancing the social aspects of work.

Time is often tight in busy contact centres, but giving agents opportunities to meet and communicate with their colleagues is essential for morale. With remote working, social breaks in the kitchen and quick conversations across the desk are no longer possible, so it’s vital to put regular time aside for colleagues to get to know each other. If having a friend at work is critical to job satisfaction, then opportunities for staff to make social connections can be a driver for better retention rates.

Show younger workers that values matter to you as a business

You could support local charities and community groups, and why not let agents nominate where the money goes? This needn’t break the bank. A donation of new gardening tools for a community orchard, for example, could make a huge difference while creating positive word-of-mouth marketing for your business. And that will help with hiring the right people in the future.

In addition, show that your values also include protecting the wellbeing of your workforce. That might mean appointing a mental health champion, or arranging mental health awareness training. Team leaders should use regular one-to-ones to ask agents about stress and workload, and look out for signs they might be struggling. Show you care about the wellbeing of employees and you’ll be rewarded with greater loyalty.

Give agents the tools to do the job well

It can be frustrating to have the right training and motivation to do a great job, then feel let down by the software you have to use. In one survey 80% of agents said having up-to-date software was critical to their engagement with the job, but only 30% said it was available in their current job. That gap speaks for itself.

The key ingredients in your recruitment and retention strategy

The fact is, recruiting and retaining good agents isn’t easy at the best of times, and it may be particularly difficult during a time that some have dubbed the “Great Resignation”.

But contact centre businesses can help themselves in this regard, creating the conditions that make them more appealing to a broader range of potential employees. Highlighting opportunities for progression, offering flexible working for those who want it and creating a caring and values-led environment are clearly key ingredients in any recruitment and retention strategy.

In other words, contact centre work may have an image problem, but confound expectations and you can attract and retain the professional workforce your business needs.

National Stress Awareness Month, run by the Stress Management Society every April, is dedicated to raising awareness of the modern stress epidemic and aims to help everyone find ways to cope with the pressures of daily life.

This year the theme of the month is ‘Community’, highlighting the importance of social cohesion to our mental health.

A focus on stress is always important, because stress levels have been rising for years. But finding ways to alleviate stress and reduce anxiety may be even more crucial in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.

The pandemic affected us all, and continues to do so. Many workers were hit hard by a combination of factors. As well as health anxieties, changing models of work and staffing shortages forced many employees to do more with less.

As we emerge from the pandemic (or at least from pandemic lockdowns), the simple truth is that many workers across the nation feel they are no longer able to cope with the demands of their jobs.

As MaxContact’s own research shows, customer-facing staff are feeling that pressure as much, or perhaps even more, than most. Our Customer Engagement burnout report reveals that 72% of customer-facing employees feel they are burnt out or will be soon. That figure rises to 83% for those who work in contact centres.

How does stress affect contact centres?

Good employers want to reduce stress for staff because it’s the right thing to do. But it really is win-win. Research shows that employees who feel looked after are more loyal to the companies that employ them and are more committed to their roles.

Right now, contact centre leaders need to go the extra mile to realise these benefits. Their staff are facing a perfect storm, thanks to growing customer expectations and the need to adjust to new ways of working.

A growing body of evidence suggests that customer expectations soared during Covid. With stores and offices closed for long periods of time, contact centres became the front line of customer experience.

They remain so today. The current cost of living crisis also means contact centre staff will continue to face a high volume of difficult conversations, as customers struggle to meet payments or comply with contract terms.

At the same time, customers have become familiar with interacting through a variety of different communication channels. That’s great, but it means in some cases that staff are juggling more concurrent conversations, adding to their levels of stress.

Home working and hybrid

On top of it all, many staff are now working from home, at least some of the time. The benefits of remote work have been well discussed, but we should also acknowledge that some employees find it difficult to adapt to home working.

That’s true physically and psychologically. Some homes are simply too small or noisy to make satisfactory office replacements. In addition, many employees miss the social buzz of office life, and the support of colleagues.

Some of this can be replaced by virtual alternatives, but not all. Clearly, the shift to remote or hybrid work has increased stress levels in some workers.

A results-based business

It’s also true, of course, that contact centres are a results-based business.

Productivity metrics are collected and analysed continually. When you feel you’re already doing more with less, this monitoring culture can add to existing work-related anxiety.

That’s reflected in our research. The vast majority of respondents (84%) said that they feel under pressure from management to deliver quantity over quality. And that’s despite most (88%) saying their current responsibilities have expanded since the pandemic.

Many companies invest in technology to help employees do their jobs. But if the equipment is too complex, or too dated to meet modern requirements, it can have the opposite effect.

Reducing work-related stress

If this looks like a bleak picture, it needn’t be. While it’s true that many contact centre agents want to leave their roles (62%, according to our survey), it’s possible to operate customer service which maximises both worker wellbeing and customer experience. Indeed, the two tend to go hand in hand.

Here are some ways to reduce stress in your contact centre:

• Don’t invest in any technology – invest in the right technology

Specialist tech can automate manual tasks, reduce manual inputs, simplify omnichannel communication and allow customers to self-serve for basic requests. It can be a huge time- and hassle-saver for staff, and good for customer satisfaction levels, too.

• Promote a positive work culture

What do staff want? They want support. They want training opportunities to get better at what they do. They want a clear path to career progression. They want social opportunities. All of this is within your power.

• Make work easier

Difficult customers or tricky problems can make working life miserable. So give your teams the tools they need, whether that’s powerful scripting or easy ways to escalate issues. Lay out logical pathways for every eventuality so that agents never feel out of their depth.

• Feedback positively

Contact centre leaders need to know that KPIs and targets are being met. That’s a given. But the key to staff wellbeing is to help them meet these targets, rather than punishing them for failure. Make feedback sessions a positive experience, by offering training and advice where necessary, and creating a culture of support rather than one of blame.

Contact centres are facing a recruitment crisis, so they can’t pay lip service to employee wellbeing any longer. Use stress awareness month to make positive changes to your own company culture, and start exploring ways to help agents do their jobs in better, more fulfilling ways.

Our Burnout report is a great place to start. You can download your copy here.  

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Before the pandemic, employees at MaxContact would meet regularly outside of the 9-5, for informal get togethers, team nights out and other social occasions. We also used to support charities together, whether that meant volunteer days or fundraising events.

Of course, all that changed a bit during the pandemic. We had virtual quizzes and distanced get togethers, but – great though these were – they weren’t the same. We realised we missed the buzz of being together, whether that was for a quick drink after work or to help fund a worthy cause.

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the team at MaxContact doubled in size between 2020 and 2021, rocketing from 30 to 60+ employees. In other words, half our current team joined during the pandemic, which means we mostly know each other virtually.

Due to business growth and the challenges of working remotely, in 2021 we thought we’d make our informal activities official. We wanted to keep the virtual socialising going during lockdown, and then be ready with a timetable of great things to do when it ended. And so, the MaxContact Social, Charities and Culture (SCC) team was born!

Here’s what our SCC volunteers – representing every part of the business – are focused on most of all.

Getting to know you…

First off, the SCC organises all the usual stuff – drinks, team building events, and fun out of the office activities like escape rooms, as well as helping to get people together who share hobbies and interests.

And we’re determined to help everybody in the business get to know each other – not just people who work in the same teams. That’s why we’ve created social mini teams, which are made up of small groups of people from different parts of the business whose paths wouldn’t normally cross too often.

These mini teams get together from time to time for a variety of different activities, and compete in our mini team leaderboard – we love a bit of friendly competition!

SCC member Lily says: “We know socialising is a huge part of team bonding and having fun away from work, but we wanted to do it a bit differently. That’s why we came up with the idea of cross-departmental mini teams. And we’re making sure there’s a wide variety of activities to suit all tastes.”

Creating a culture

At MaxContact, we all push in the same direction. Everybody plays a crucial role in the success of the business.

We wanted to reflect and celebrate that by mixing departments (so everyone knows what everyone else does, and can understand their challenges), embedding our company values, and recognising achievements. We’re doing that through staff awards and shout outs in company updates, and in 2022 we’ll be introducing a buddy system for new starters, to help embed our values from the beginning.

SCC member Pip says: “Nurturing a positive, consistent company culture is essential, for the good of our colleagues and our clients. We want everyone to know what MaxContact stands for.”

Giving back

Through the SCC, MaxContact is supporting three charities every year, chosen by the team. We’ll support them through fundraising and volunteering. In 2022 our focus is on homeless charity Barnabus, Cancer Research and the WWF. For Barnabus, we’ve already donated food and clothing, and three team members have volunteered at the charity’s Manchester Hub. Much more is planned through the rest of the year.

Another focus in 2022 will be on sustainability and reducing our carbon footprint. We’re working on creative ways to do that now. Our role is also to promote diversity in the organisation. We’re already a diverse bunch, but we know there is more we can do.

SCC member Greg says: “As a growing organisation, we’re committed to giving something back. We’ll achieve that through a timetable of fundraising and volunteering for our chosen charities.”

The SCC

We hope that gives you a flavour of what the SCC is and what we aim to achieve. MaxContact has been through an impressive period of growth, and that means we have to work a little bit harder to make sure we all get to know each other inside and outside the office, and to promote a positive work culture. We also want to give something back.

If you’re interested in joining the MaxContact team, check out our careers page for current opportunities.

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That’s according to our new study, Customer Engagement Burnout,¹ which surveyed 750 UK workers in customer-facing roles, including contact centre agents and those whose jobs regularly involve talking to customers over the phone.

Customer engagement workers play a vital role in the UK economy. The contact centre industry employs over 800,000 people, with millions more working in other roles talking to customers regularly on the phone, for example box office staff or sales professionals.

However, 72% of these workers say they are ‘burnt out’ or will be burnt out imminently, rising to 83% of those working in contact centres. As a result, the industry could be facing a similar talent crisis to the 2021 HGV driver shortage. Nearly half (49%) said they dislike their job and would be looking to move in the near future, rising to 62% of contact centre workers.

The reasons for this burnout are clear:

• 52% say their workload has increased dramatically since the beginning of the pandemic, and 43% are faced with long working hours
• 88% say the responsibilities within their existing role have expanded since the beginning of the pandemic, without a pay rise or promotion.
• On average, staff have taken on between one- and two-people’s work in addition to their own, with 10% even stretched to the capacity of three or more people.

Workers aren’t just overworked, they’re underappreciated. Nearly two thirds (63%) say their company thinks the end-customer experience is more important than employee wellbeing and 84% feel under pressure from management to deliver quantity over quality when it comes to interactions with customers.

Workers are also reporting that the support measures put in place aren’t having an impact. While just over half (54%) are aware of mental health support initiatives at their workplace, only 32% of them said their managers follow them ‘all the time’. And while 61% have some kind of specialist customer engagement technology to help them do their job, this is much more common in contact centres and is having limited impact on job satisfaction.

We’re calling for a commitment from industry leaders to make 2022 the year of the agent by transforming working practices to put the wellbeing of frontline customer service staff on the same footing as customer satisfaction.  

Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, said: “For those on the phone to customers every day, two years of working alone at the kitchen table, mounting workloads and little interaction with colleagues has taken its toll. People are telling us that they’re feeling overworked, under supported and aren’t hopeful that things are likely to change. Many are considering leaving their job, and even the industry, altogether.

“We need to make a change and fix the balance between customer satisfaction levels and investment in staff wellbeing.

“That’s why we’re making 2022 the year of the agent. While it’s down to each organisation to provide employees with competitive salaries, benefits and career progression opportunities to make these jobs attractive, we believe every part of the industry has a role to play.

“For us, this means putting workers’ wellbeing – the end-user of our platform – at the heart of everything we do. We’re making sure technology is actually helping staff, including reducing time spent on menial, repetitive tasks, increasing efficiencies of people and making it simple and easy to deliver great interactions with customers so they feel good about their work – without unnecessary stress.

“Those working in customer-facing roles are the hidden backbone of society – we need to make sure that we’re repaying their commitment with the support they deserve.”

1. MaxContact commissioned independent market research company, Censuswide, to survey a nationally representative sample of 752 workers employed in customer-facing roles, with 250 respondents that work in contact centres, and 502 respondents who speak to customers every day on the phone. The poll was conducted between 19^th and 26^th November 2021. Unless stated otherwise, all figures were drawn from this poll. 

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