Explore fresh, expert perspectives on customer engagement and innovation

They used to be called call centres, and now they’re called contact centres. There’s a good reason for the change. Today, customers want to contact you in the way that best suits them at any particular time.  

Or to put it another way, they want the option of calling your customer service line to be one among many.

More customers want the option to email your support teams, send a quick text message (SMS), or use online chat. They also want to self-serve where possible. Providing these alternatives is one of the best ways to improve customer satisfaction.  

Customers love a consistent, simple and connected experience on any channel, and so do your teams do too. It helps them improve customer service by giving advisors instant access to all correspondence between a client and your company. A good omnichannel solution should centralise all interactions, giving a complete view of customer engagement.  

Bringing your voice and digital communications together in one place means you can serve customers faster and more satisfactorily. It helps your teams prioritise the most urgent enquiries.

If your current customer engagement software doesn’t offer these options, or does so only as an afterthought, you might be looking for something better.

Similarly, if your current engagement software is coming to the end of its contract, it’s time to explore the market. There may be a more efficient and cost-effective option out there than your current solution.

With that in mind, here are five things you must look out for when considering a new omnichannel contact centre solution.

Security and integration

It goes without saying that your next omnichannel engagement software needs to be super secure, but what does that mean in practice?

It certainly needs to give you the tools to ensure that you’re  GDPR and Ofcom compliant, and you should check that it comes with the latest data security certifications. Think ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials. If it’s a cloud-based system – and that comes with many benefits – make sure the infrastructure and data is housed in secure, compliant data centres.  

If you take payments, you need to be even more picky. Look for a secure payments manager that ensures customer information is always protected, encrypted and anonymised with PCI certifications

Finally, contact centre software works best when it integrates seamlessly with other core applications, like your CRM or data management solutions, and uses the information to make your service better. Make sure that it allows for these integrations.

Flexibility and scalability

Your needs change over time, but you don’t want to be upgrading your omnichannel engagement software every year. So can it scale as you do? Can it add new features and integrations when you need them?  

In addition, the solution you choose needs to fit your requirements exactly. If you’re a debt collection agency, it’s not just about contacting customers, it’s about doing so compliantly. Sales teams need an overall view of performance, plus insight at the individual level. Customer service departments have to be able to expand rapidly as the need arises, while at the same time ensuring quality levels remain high.

Your engagement software can help, if it has the relevant features. Ask any potential provider to demonstrate what it can offer in each area.

Flexibility is also about offering customers the communication channels they want. MaxContact currently offers SMS, email, WhatsApp, Messenger and web chat, alongside voice. Can your solution say the same?

Insights and reporting

Knowledge is the key to effective contact centres, and your omnichannel engagement software needs to provide it.

That means effortless reporting using easy-to-create custom dashboards, giving you the information you need and nothing you don’t. You should be able to define key targets and visualise key data.  

Ideally, you should be able to collect and view information in real time, whether that’s team performance or customer satisfaction, and really stay on top of your SLAs.

AI-driven speech analytics is another powerful tool for delivering customer insight, with automatic analysis of conversations, sentiment and emotion. Ask your provider if they have it, or if it is on their development roadmap.

Ease of use

The easier the software is to operate, the more likely it is that your teams will make full use of all its tools and features and the quicker they’re productive.  

So, is your chosen solution easy to navigate and intuitive to use? Or is it cluttered and confusing? If it’s the latter, it will undermine the efficiency of your teams, and make it far more costly to expand team numbers because of increased training requirements.  

It’s also true that good software makes your users life easier. It allows employees to meet their targets more easily, deal with difficult customers in the best way, and continually improve their knowledge and performance. That’s good for your business, and also helps guard against employee burnout, something we’ve talked about at length.  

Compliance

On top of everything, your contact software should help ensure that you’re always acting compliantly. ICO and Ofcom enforce strict regulations around the frequency and timing of calls and dealing with vulnerable customers, among other things.  

Good omnichannel engagement software provides the tools to help you meet those requirements. That includes scripting solutions that let you create compelling and compliant scripts for every circumstance and edit them in seconds. It should certainly include intelligent outbound dialling that blends dialling types to reduce dropped calls, and that automatically checks and integrates “no call” lists.

Other things to consider when choosing an omnichannel engagement software

Those are five key factors when considering a new engagement software solution, but they’re not the only things to think about…

• Hidden costs: Are you paying a flat fee per user or do you get charged for additional features? For that matter, are you being charged for a demo, trial or proof of concept? At MaxContact, demos are always free (of both cost and obligation).
  
• Support: How easy is it to raise support tickets, and how long do they take to resolve?
  
• Expertise: Get to know your providers before you make a decision. Are they contact centre experts or just resellers? Do they have an inhouse team of developers?
  
• Accreditations: It’s great to be given the tools to operate compliantly, but are your providers acting compliantly themselves? Always check their accreditations.
  

It sometimes feels like we live in an angry age. It certainly feels that way to customer-facing staff, who have been subject to a growing torrent of abuse since the start of the pandemic.

In fact, according to the Institute of Customer Service, 60% of customer-facing staff have experienced hostility from customers since early 2020, ranging from shouting and swearing to racial abuse, death threats, spitting and physical attacks. The Institute is running a campaign to highlight the issue.

But it’s not just abuse. Contact centre staff in many sectors are also fielding a growing number of calls from distressed customers who may be struggling to pay bills or meet other commitments.

Research from Forrester in 2021 found that nearly 67% of contact centres were dealing with more complex customer enquiries than a year earlier, and that 70% were facing more calls from “emotionally charged” customers.

Much of this research was carried out during the heat of the pandemic, but with the cost of living crisis in full swing, the situation is unlikely to ease.

With that in mind, we’ve put together six tips to help contact centre staff deal with angry or emotional customers.

6 ways to deal with difficult customers:

1) Have clear processes in place

In most cases, angry customers can be calmed by an advisor who takes their issue seriously and, if the matter can’t be dealt with there and then, describes a clear path to resolution.

Have guidelines in place for every eventuality and a consistent series of next steps. Make sure your team know them (intelligent scripting can help) and can talk them through with customers. Customers often get frustrated when they can’t see an end to the issue or worry they’ll spend long periods of time in call queues or being passed between departments.

When advisors take ownership of their issue, many customers quickly become calmer.

2) Give customers obvious ways to complain

It sounds counterintuitive, but making it easy for customers to complain is one way to keep them happy.

Most customers accept that mistakes sometimes happen. Frustrations arise when there’s no obvious way to draw an organisation’s attention to an error or oversight. Advertise a complaints line and email, and ensure they’re monitored. Customers will appreciate easy ways to report issues, as long as organisations respond promptly and appropriately.

3) Remain calm and constructive

However irate a customer gets, team members should stay calm, focusing on what they can do to help. It’s easy to get infuriated with customers who appear to be taking their own frustrations out on a blameless employee, but it’s also counterproductive. It will probably prolong the call, inflame emotions further and could lead to unnecessary escalation. Unless the customer becomes abusive, stay personable, and emphasise the steps you are taking – or will take – to resolve the problem. Empathy is crucial here. If the organisation is in error, agents should acknowledge that the customer has a right to be unhappy.

At the same time, advisors shouldn’t have to suffer insults and abuse. Have guidelines in place for them to follow in the event that an emotional caller becomes an insulting or threatening one. For example, some contact centres transfer rude and abusive customers to a recorded message.

4) Differentiate between angry customers and abusive ones

We should also reiterate again that customers have a right to complain about poor service or an error that costs them time and energy to resolve. An angry customer venting about the faulty processes of the organisation is not the same as an abusive one directing anger at an individual agent. Organisations should be able to accept honest criticism and act on it.

5) Offer callbacks

If a team member can’t resolve an issue during a call, the next best way to diffuse a difficult situation is to offer a callback. Advisors may need to involve another department in a customer complaint, or escalate it to a senior manager. Putting a customer on hold during this process can lead to growing frustration, especially if the wait is longer than a couple of minutes. Offer a callback so the customer can get on with their day while their complaint is dealt with. But if you do offer a callback you have to honour it, and at the time agreed.

6) Train your advisors

It’s a good idea to train your team to deal specifically with difficult calls, but training more generally is even more essential. In a nutshell, the more knowledgeable your team is, the more faith customers will have that they can and will resolve complex issues.

In fact, the kind of good contact centre management practices that help drive efficiency can also help to reduce the number of difficult calls agents have to deal with. For example, fast call answering can take the edge off a customer’s anger. Answering an email complaint within the advertised time shows you take complaints seriously. Intelligent call routing that gets them to the right person first time cuts out one cause of customer frustration.

In other words, having the tools in place to manage your contact centre effectively also helps to pacify difficult customers. Those tools should include intelligent scripting. Giving agents scripted guidance helps them lead difficult conversations to a satisfactory outcome. Download our ebook for more information on smart scripting and templates you can use in your own contact centres for dealing with difficult customers.  

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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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