Call Centre Work is Difficult

Like most other professions, call centre work has an emotional and therefore psychological impact on staff.  More so I believe because the agent cannot see the customer hence unable to read the other person’s body-language.  

Often quoted is that 93% of communication is non-verbal.  This is untrue.  This figure arose from a study conducted by Dr. Albert Mehrabian in the 1970s.  In his narrow study he found that 7% of a message was conveyed in words, 38% through vocal elements, and 55% through non-vocal elements such as facial expressions, gestures, and body language. People incorrectly combined the 38 and 55 when of course vocal elements are part of what is being said.

What we can say from this study is that communications over the phone removes more than half of how we usually convey our message.  The figure that I work with when developing my communication programmes is that call centre agents only have 40% of our usual methods of communication.  With the use of good tone and inflection in their voice an agent can control difficult conversations.    

Call Centre work would be one of the most highly measured industries with close scrutiny on average handling and holding times, average speed of answer, average work time, call-back numbers, quality assurance checks, not to mention administration time, and roster modifications across the workday.

All of these measurements impact negatively on an agent, albeit they may not be immediately obvious.  As the agent becomes impacted they look for ways to support themselves. For example, average handling times become a target rather than a guide. They may incorrectly use administration time to delay accepting the next call is another example. Or they may skip a few steps in the recommended process in order to speed up the number of calls that they make/receive.

Over time, each of these monitoring systems plus the calls received from difficult customers adds to their bucket of stress. I was told of a senior manager who said during a safety and health presentation that their call centre was a safe place to work as there was very little to trip over, nothing to fall on workers, or much to injure themselves with except the odd paper cut.  Quite correct.  But the psychological impact is immense. 

All of the negative impacts faced daily in a call centre, if not dealt with adequately, accumulate leading to a high incidence of workplace stress. This leads to high absenteeism rates, and worse still high presenteeism rates. Presenteeism is when an employee turns up for work but isn't engaged, they are simply there physically but not mentally. This leads to poor customer service, mistakes being made, and ultimately reflects badly on the organisation.

Who would have thought answering the phone could be so difficult?

Call Centre Frustrations

I wonder if you thought that I was going to explore the frustrations that we sometimes have when we make a phone call to a call centre. Sorry to say, this post is not about your frustration, it's about the frustrations faced by call centre staff when you abuse them. This post is provided to give you a perspective from the call centre agent’s point of view.

Frustration is probably the best single word to describe workplace stress in a call centre.  Frustration at the caller who isn't comprehending what they are being told, frustration at not seeing their work completed when they have to hand the call over to another agent, frustration at colleagues who didn't do their job well-enough in the first place, frustration at being overly supervised, and frustration at the numerous performance measures implemented to monitor their work. 

Add to this the challenging people who call; the angry, the sad, the talkers, the swearers, and those who just won’t listen.  If not dealt with adequately, this continual frustration will lead to workplace stress. 

Stress is probably not something that you would associate with a call centre unless you have worked in one.  Compared with other professions, call centres have a higher than average staff turnover rate, higher than average presenteeism, and higher than average absenteeism. Who would have thought, all they do is to answer the phone isn’t it? Anyone can do that can’t they? No and no, they do much more than that.

Can you imagine going to work with the intention of helping people and all you get for your effort is to be screamed at by the very people you are trying to help? Depending on the type of call centre and the role within it, an agent can expect to be yelled at every 1 in 10 calls they receive. That would be unacceptable in any other industry. 

The way these abusive calls were handled in early times was to simply hang-up the phone. In today's environment, that is not only forbidden it causes more problems than it solves. The disgruntled caller is now likely to complain about your actions, harbour a grudge, tell all of their friends about how bad your company is, and return even more enraged as they fester on how badly they were treated.

I like the saying; "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar". What this phrase is actually referring to is that when you're trying to accomplish something, you'll have more success by being polite rather than being rude. 

The next time that you have to phone a call centre, be nice to the agent and watch what happens.

Don't Abuse Call Centre Staff!

Over the next few days I will be blogging about call centre staff.  I will explain what they do, how they do it, and ways that you can help them to help you. 

Probably the greatest communicators in any area of the customer industry are those people who work in call centres and contact centres.  To explain the difference, call centres do nothing but place and answer phone calls whereas contact centres undertake additional tasks such as email and postal inquiries. 

A better name for contact centres may be communication centres.  Nevertheless I am going to refer to both centres as call centres.  Why, it is less letters to type and my two typing fingers are getting tired!  I will also refer to call centre employees as agents rather than representatives for the same reason.

Similar to the reasons why people are drawn to become crisis negotiators, the people who work in this industry are also drawn to work there.  They are naturally empathetic, have a desire to help others and for the most part are a communicative and friendly group of people.  They have a strong desire to help others. 

As we know, the main drivers of customer satisfaction regardless of the industry is that the entire service experience met the customer’s expectations, that the customer was treated fairly and that their individual circumstances were taken into account.  Customers appreciate staff who are competent, knowledgeable and kept their promise. 

Most importantly, the customer was treated with respect.  This last point is often hard to achieve with the more challenging (when you read the word challenging in my coming posts you can replace it with the word difficult if that works better for you) amongst us who sometimes get quite personal in our conversations when we don’t get what we want. 

Always remember, the person that you are yelling at on the other end of the phone is doing their very best to help you. It is not their fault that your machine broke down, that your internet doesn't work, that your satellite dish blew of the roof, or that your bank balance has gone into overdraft. They are there to help you not to hinder you. They have a set of rules that they have to abide by and will do everything in their power to assist you.

You might feel better by yelling at the agent. Imagine though how the agent feels when they went to work to help people and all that you did was abuse them for simply trying to help.

Change Your Thoughts.

I am not an expert in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) but I have used a few of these techniques to trick my brain into thinking positively about a negative event thus reducing the emotional reaction each time these thoughts of the negative event arrive in my head.

NLP provides an understanding of the mental and cognitive processes behind our behaviour to certain situations.  We can reprogram our brain using these techniques.  By changing the way we think about a situation we can change our emotional reaction and our perception as a result.  So how does that work?

Inside our brain is the amygdala which is responsible for our emotions.  When someone attacks us for example, the amygdala sends a signal to alert our emergency response mechanisms so that we can fight or flee.  The amygdala is attached to our hippocampus, this part of our brain stores our long-term memory.  So, when we have a bad event the amygdala alerts our response functions and at the same time the bad memory is stored for future reference with a marker.

This is the brain's way of protecting us so that if a similar event happens in the future we are ready for it.  The hippocampus and amygdala have worked in tandem to burn or 'brand' that bad memory into our brain. 

Taking the example of someone attacking us, every time you have some kind of a reminder or connection to that attack you will also have an emotional reaction.  The connection to the attack could be a smell, a sound, a sight, or just a random thought of the attack.  When you are reminded of the attack, the hippocampus alerts the amygdala and you have the same emotional reaction as you had when the attack first occurred.   

While you can never completely remove this bad memory, you can lessen the subsequent emotional reaction each time the thought of the attack comes into your head.  In your mind, take an image of that negative event then put a picture frame around it.  Once you have the image inside the frame you then hang the framed image on a wall.  Now stand back and look at the picture again.  It is now a harmless picture. Our brain has been tricked into thinking the event never actually occurred.  You may have to do this several times to embed the effect. 

There are many other useful NLP techniques, Dr Google can show you more of them. 

Let's Talk.

We are getting so busy, everything is moving faster, things are instantaneous, our head is spinning with information, our brain is working in overdrive - and that is just in the first hour of each day.

Because of this continuous fast pace, we often forget to stop for a moment and talk. I did that once, I was too busy to stop and talk to my mother who asked me to sit and have a cup of tea with her. "Too busy Mum", I yelled back while driving away. My mother died from a stroke before I got back and had that cup of tea. A true story, and the beginning of my slide into a terrible part of my life.

Did that get your attention? I was too busy: working long hours solving crimes at work, studying for university degrees (three of them), building an extension on my house, on-call as a police negotiator, and maintaining a high level of physical fitness. Why not, there is 24 hours in a day I used to tell myself.

Sleep, that's for old people. Food, two hamburgers a day is enough. Exercise, I ran everywhere. That's all we need to survive isn't it? Maslow said that our important needs are food, water, and shelter followed by safety and security. I was a cop with a good job, a nice home, a loving family, a great car, the best food available. I had all bases covered.

However, I didn't read all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I wish that I had. Above safety and security is 'socialisation'. That is the need for us to talk, to interact, to share, to be part of a community, to stop for a moment and talk. Talking is about many things. It’s about learning the art of: communication, of social skills, of manners, of laughing, of forgetting about your worries for a few minutes.

When was the last time you said "I'm too busy to stop and talk".