Stress in Call Centers : Steps taken by Companies to Handle Stress Factors

STRESS IN CALL CENTERS

Stress exists in every call center. Call centers are stressful work environments. The demands of serving the customer in real-time helps to lay the foundation. Add to this factor things such as job repetition, potential job dissatisfaction, poor ergonomics or low pay and the stress level climbs higher.

If stress in the workplace (i.e. the call center) is not on the agenda the results of stress are revealed through higher absenteeism than other parts of the company, higher Worker’s Compensation claims and ultimately in reduced customer satisfaction.

This Operations Topic focuses on various approaches to managing stress. Raising the pay isn’t necessarily the solution. There are many other creative means of managing stress in your call center.

Factors that Create a Stressful Call Center

· Stress in the Call Center will affect the agent, manager, director, or anyone in the call center when they let stress gain control. When this happens, they lose self control and have the feeling of being overwhelmed. The first step in gaining control is and identifying what the stressors are and understanding the causes and effects. Stress is caused by many things. Time pressures, high expectations, lack of communication, high call volume, inexperience, ill-prepared, to name a few. The effects are decreased productivity, anxiety, low morale, poor customer service levels, and (yikes!) increased turnover. When faced with these stressors, training is the tool to resolve the issues. You must go to your training programs and processes and ask yourself if the training you are providing the call center employees delivers the tools required for them to accomplish their goals without the negative stress. Approach dealing with the stress in the Call Center with assertiveness and confidence to conquer! One of the most effective things I have done, in my own call center experience, as well as seen in other call centers, is to have a specific workshop covering stress. Let the employees voice their specific stressors and develop actions to overcome them and resolve what is inhibiting their performance. Their minds are then clear and mentally prepared. They will then be motivated for training to make them a more confident and capable call center employee.

· Lack of communication

is a call center disease that some call centers just gravitate to simply because everyone is too busy with their job duties and with doing someone else’s jobs that we simply forget to communicate. Sounds harmless but if you don’t address it, it could slowly but surely drag down your center’s morale, employees’ self esteems, work life balance, job security, employees’ productivities, etc …. (you just fill in the rest!!)

· HIGH VOLUME

This one is a little tougher because the causes could be variety of different issues. The more common symptom of high volume is poor workforce mgmt. Simply put, your workforce team needs to be very proactive in correctly forecasting your volume two weeks in advance (within 98% of the actual volume) and be ready with a staffing analysis of how efficient the CSR schedules are by day for you. If you can get this every week from your workforce team, you will be well aware of your holes every day for the next two weeks and you can make staffing decisions before the day happens. If your workforce team is good, then you will better prepare to handle spikes/lull in your volume.

Another symptom of high volume is poor attendance/retention – if you consistently don’t have the reps that you planned for, then you might as well stay home too. Issues like these are harder to address because the root causes are never the same. You have to go the employees and find out why they are not coming to work or why they are leaving you. Once you have an idea of the root causes, then you and your team can creatively find solutions or create new policies to address them.

High volume is a self feeding animal – if you don’t get control of it, it will surely brings down your operation. Your frontline supervisors will have to help out on the phones all the time and they can’t work with their CSRs. Employees are constantly going from one call to the next without much breaks in between. Your boss is constantly on you for high ASAs and Abandon %s, blah – the story goes on and on and the picture doesn’t look pretty.

• Common causes include understaffing, impossible service levels, inappropriate or oppressive management style, mis-match between agent skills and job requirements, mis-match between the stated aims of the job and the actual work being done (e.g. a sales centre that is swamped with technical service complaints), jobs that require no thought on the part of the operator and that could/should be automated (directory enquiries, bank balance requests etc).

EMOTIONAL LABOUR

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The Call Center “Industry”: Human Issues

Understanding – The Call Center “Industry”

There has been some dispute amongst researchers as to whether it is appropriate to refer to such a thing as the “call center industry”. As Bain and Taylor point out, “despite similarities in the integration of computer and telephone technologies, centers differ in relation to a number of important variables—size, industrial sector and market, complexity and length of call cycle time, nature of operations (inbound, outbound or combined), the nature and effectiveness of representative institutions including trade unions, and management styles and priorities”. To this list of variables, Callaghan and Thompson would add the “degree of product complexity and variability and the depth of knowledge required to deal with the service interaction”. Bain and Taylor argue that it is more appropriate to use the term “sector”, as call Centers are found across a wide range of industries and may be similar primarily in terms of their core technologies. They do note, however, that there is a professional literature and a collective identity that is maintained and developed through conferences and forums. Belt, Richardson and Webster (2000) agree that call centers are not an ‘industry’ as the term is generally defined, but rather represent certain ways of delivering various services using the telephone and computer technologies across traditional industry boundaries. However, these authors provide three strong reasons defending the practice of referring to call centers as an industry:

First, the call center community often defines itself as an industry, with numerous national and international call center conferences and workshops taking place each year, industry journals and call center forums organized at local levels.

Second, the labor force requirements of call centers are often the same across sectors. This means that many, though not all, call centers share a common labor pool.
Third, the organizational templates and technologies used tend to be very similar, regardless of the sector.

To this one might add the remarkable similarities that international researchers have found between technologies used, work practices and key issues including monitoring, control, training, and labor demographics for workers in countries as diverse as Germany, Japan, Australia, Greece, Canada, the US, the UK and the Netherlands.

HUMAN ISSUES IN CALL-CENTER INDUSTRY

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