How to Save Your Customer Service Team from Burnout

Customer service teams are problem solvers. To say that they have to overcome many hurdles in order to provide 24/7 customer service and resolve tons of incoming enquiries would be an understatement.  

It is common knowledge that happy employees lead to happier customers. By the same logic, have you ever wondered about the adverse effect of interacting with irate customers day-in, day-out on your customer service teams?

Burnout is real, and has been officially recognised by WHO in 2019 as an occupational phenomenon. It usually results from chronic stress induced by unrealistic expectations shouldered by the employees in a highly volatile environment, such as contact centres.

#DidYouKnow A study conducted by Cornell University determined that over 87% of employees surveyed reported high or very high stress levels at their workplace; and 77% reported high or very high personal levels of stress.

The support teams promptly answer inbound enquiries from customers across multiple channels of communication, actively reach out to customers to extend a helping hand wherever needed and ensure that the customers have a delightful experience with the business.

But on the other side, the attrition rates of contact centres are off the roof. It is common for contact centres to have an average annual attrition rate between 30% to 45%. Customer support representatives in their budding years have an average tenure of just one year before they switch jobs.

It is important to identify the signs and symptoms behind this and act promptly to avoid seeing its adverse effects on business goals.

If your team members tick more than three boxes in the following list, they may be feeling the heat at work.

Causes, Symptoms, and Cure of a Burnout

Burnout results from chronic stress at workplace and usually seeps through in an organisation when the employees are under supported and overworked. Without a proper tech-backed edifice, it can very quickly manifest as exhaustion, helplessness, and anxiety.

Leaders of the customer facing teams can refer to the following checklist to determine whether their team is on the verge of a burnout.

#DidYouKnow 52% of customer service representatives who are at severe risk of burnout said their company is not customer-focused, and 41% who are at severe risk of burnout said they did not feel empowered.

Backlog of Customer Enquiries

Customers prefer to connect with businesses on the channels that are most convenient for them. It could be social media, email, live chat, or phone calls.

• Causes and Symptoms:

If you have not empowered your customer service team with an omnichannel solution, they will be constantly jumping back and forth between multiple communication channels to address incoming enquiries.  

When the volume of these enquiries rises, it very quickly overwhelms them, and it will not be uncommon for many customer enquiries to slip through and be left unanswered.

• Cure:

A total experience SaaS solution like CINNOX can help your customer service team address enquiries from all the channels seamlessly on a single platform. It saves them the hassle of fumbling between multiple channels of communication and also gives you a single-window dashboard to collate required data in order to provide top-notch service to your customers without burdening your team.

#DidYouKnow Businesses with highly engaged employees report 20% higher sales figures.

Poor CSAT (customer satisfaction) Score

Simply put, higher CSAT score translates to higher revenue. CSAT scores is a good metric to understand customer sentiment and improve your business based on customer feedback.

• Causes and Symptoms:

Without a solution to key in and save basic customer data to improve their support experience, your customer service team will be handicapped from the beginning, impacting business. When customers are repeatedly asked for their basic information and to repeat their issues to multiple customer service agents, it only adds to their dissatisfaction, while the customer support agents helplessly try to alleviate the tension.  

• The Cure:

Managing all your customer information and communication channels on a single platform like CINNOX gives businesses the leverage to increase their team’s efficiency, productivity, and response to opportunities. Easily automise repetitive FAQs and deliver more humanising experiences for your customers by enabling seamless transition of enquiries from bots to agent, who are more susceptible to handle complex enquiries and requests instantly. This way, your agents have more time on hand to devote to attending important engagements, without taking on the burden of mundane tasks.

#DidYouKnow 92% employees believe showing empathy is an important way to advance employee retention.

Data Fragmentation

Customers engage with businesses across multiple devices, browsers, and channels; these interactions are often recorded with different identifiers for the same customer.

• Causes and Symptoms:

Disconnected identities or customer data stored in separate, legacy or on-premises platformsleads to a fragmented view of customer journey, leaving your customer service team to pick up the scattered pieces from the floor.  

For your customer service team to succeed in the face of increasing fragmentation, simplifying access is the way forward.

• The Cure:

CINNOX offers integration to several Content Management (CMS), Social Messaging Apps, Contact Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and Email platforms, so that your teams can leverage unified data to understand what matters most to specific customer groups.

#DidYouKnow Disengaged employees can cost businesses $450 billion to $550 billion every year!

Working in Silos

Post Covid-19, lots of businesses went through a major shift to combat asynchronous communication. Many attributed this to the lack of a collaborative solution and the disparity in access to contextual information. It was leading to slower decisions, planning and solutions, which in turn added to the reduced professional efficiency of the customer service team.

• Causes and Symptoms:

If your customer service representatives are part of an insular team that is resistant to share information internally, you are bound to see lower employee morale, a general disconnect between their growth objective and organisation’s goal that would adversely reflect on customer experience and customer satisfaction.

Empowering your customer service team with the right solution can encourage them to work in cohesion and seek each other’s help to work towards a common goal.

Inability to pair customers with the right customer service representatives based on their expertise and failure to exchange any contextual information collected during the interaction can lead to information disparity, and result in decline in productivity.

• The Cure:

CINNOX offers businesses the flexibility to work in cohesion and establish enquiry routing rules based on business requirements. Businesses can prevent burnout by setting destination endpoints to cater to different customers based on their locations or browser language settings. It is also possible to impose rules to redirect enquiries according to percentage volume or time of day.  

It is easier than ever to gift your team a collaborative advantage with a combination of our features like enquiry transfer that enables a staff member to transfer an enquiry to another team member if any additional assistance is required. Enquiry monitoring and take-over enables team leaders to observe and mentor their staff in real-time, with the flexibility to take-over a conversation if necessary. Our Slack-like workspace facilitates your customer service representatives to team-up and find quick-resolution for customer enquiries.

Bad EX Leads to Poor CX

Here is the long and short of it - Prevention is better than cure.

So, what can businesses do to save customer service teams from burning out?

• Support your teams with an effective Collaboration Solution so that they can seek help from each other and provide timely and effective service to customers.

• Shortage of sufficient training material can result in lack in engagement and confidence. Businesses should not just train their employees during induction and onboarding, but also make it a practice to use the assembled agent-customer interaction data to train their teams on an ongoing basis to add value to their growth and provide them a forum to resolve their doubts.  

• Humanise connections by striking the right balance between AI and customer service team. AI can empower them to do their jobs better. A good example of this is the smart routing feature within CINNOX, which analyses incoming interactions, routes it to the right destination based on the rules determined by the businesses. Features like smart routing can make your customer service team’s life much easier.  

• If a business is not empowering its employees with the right tool to collect, process, and leverage accurate, actionable data of its customers, it is failing to capture their intentions when they interact with the business.
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• It is important for team leaders to have a real-time view of the interactions between their team and customers. Constructive criticism or positive feedback from leaders is crucial for their continual improvement, but this is not possible without having a platform that enables you to monitor these interactions in real-time. In order to improve workforce productivity, leaders need to have quick and easy access to records and reports, and the flexibility to make adjustments wherever necessary.

Connecting all channels of communication on one platform, like CINNOX, can help businesses in leveraging customer intent data, insights and analytics collated from multiple channels, and also give the customer service teams a panoramic view of customers’ expectation, which can be derived from the history of interactions. This in turn can be used to enhance experiences and provide outstanding support.