Stress

[Larry Doyle]

I am a trainer and would like to have some input about stress in call center operations? What are some specific stressors for all levels in the operation and what coping mechanisms are people using?

thanks

[doug_helvig@cbmg.com]

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.

[thetuan]

I think Doug "hit the nail on the head" in describing some of the stress factors in the call center environment.

I'll pick out two that I have seen in call centers over and over again - lack of communication and high volumes.

LACK OF COMMUNICATION

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!!)

Some of the things that I have seen worked to address this issue are as follows:
1) weekly employee focus group - any employee can come to
a weekly or bi weekly focus group with the call center
manager and human resource manager. Questions from
the employees are posted publicly and the date that the
issues were addressed. Over time, I have seen focus
groups that started with very serious issues slowly evolve
to sessions that become more like rap sessions - more fun
and less serious.
2) a monthly newsletter from the company or better yet,
from the call center operation. Yes, this is a time consuming
endeavor but if done right and done consistently, could be
a great medium to communicate new/revised policies,
reward employees/teams, train your employees, and build
strong team spirits.
3) daily department huddle - each team/department should
be highly encourage to have this quicky huddle daily with
their employees. This goes a loooong way in building that
strong bond between employees and supervisors and yes,
you can also use this time to communicate.
4) a monthly letter from the BOSS - it could be from the VP
of Ops, or it could be from the CCM. The point is, the
company will have an opportunity every month to speak
to the workforce.

You could do other things to communicate but I have found that by having structured and organized methods to communicate, you don't really have a choice but to do it :) All levels of employees will now have opportunities to communicate issues and mgmt will have opportunities to know about it and hopefully, correct it and communicate it back to the employees.

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 blah blah - the story goes on and on and the picture doesn't look pretty.

Hope this helps

Tuan

[csteven]

The other writers are very good & give an overall environmental picture. I'd like to get down & dirty & talk about the customers themselves. Let's assume you have a fairly decent work environment where the staff communicate with one another, if so then the major stress source may be from the customes.

I find that for female call center agents nothing gets them more upset than to be called the "Bit _ _" word. For guys the trigger is to be called "stupid" or something to that effect, "loser", "idiot", "dumb ---", etc.

I coach my agents to recognize this & to not fall prey to this trigger. Usually customers are just stressful themselves & are trying to pass the stress along to others. Once the agents recognize this, they smile, & I hope don't get caught up in it when they get a customer calling them the "B" word or a "dumb ---."

Good luck.

Steve

[Adorno]

Larry,

We completed a technical report titled "Analysis of Employee Turnover and Job Performance in Call Centers". Part of this analysis included an exhaustive study of "frustrating" aspects of call center jobs as reported by call center reps and their managers. These stressors are detailed separately for Customer Service and Telemarketing reps.

We generally charge $75 for the report, but I'll be happy to e-mail you a free copy if you'd like.

Feel free to contact me using the information below if you would like to receive the technical report. You also can visit our site to review another relevant paper titled "Understanding and Combating Call Center Employee Turnover" if you're interested.

Regards!
Anthony Adorno
Vice President
The DeGarmo Group, Inc.
www.degarmogroup.com
Adorno@degarmogroup.com
(309) 820-1435

[simon]

The problem why people suffer from stress in call centers is that is sooooooooooo boring.the end

[Techno_Techie]

Simon,
I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you. It's not because it's soooooo boring. While you do bring up a good point of there not being much to do when you are either providing Tech Support or filing out billing information.
It's due to many other things.
Stess in a call centre is brought up by many things, such as for a good example, Customer's who feel the need to argue with the agent or berate the agent.
Other factors may include, substandard working conditions, long hours ( I work 11.5 hours a day) and high call volumes.

Other than workshops and communication do you guys have anthing else to sujest towards helping reduce Call Centre Stess?