How To Save Your Customer Service Team From Burnout
Table of contents
Customer-facing jobs are tough. According to a study by Toister Solutions, 74% of customer support professionals are at risk of burnout.
Consistently working under pressure, doing multiple shifts, and having to deal with heavy workload are some of the main reasons for burnout in customer service.
Many of these factors are beyond anyone’s control because of the very nature of a customer-facing job. However, there are some steps customer support leaders can take to alleviate some of these stresses and create a healthy environment to help their agents thrive.
In this blog we’ll be looking at –
- What is customer service burnout?
- What are some warning signs that your customer service team needs a break?
- Strategies to prevent your customer service team from experiencing burnout.
Table of Contents
- What is customer service burnout?
- Three warning signs your customer service team needs a break
- Strategies to prevent your customer service team from burning out
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Wrapping up
What is customer service burnout?
Simply put, customer service burnout is a state of mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion that occurs in customer support operators. It can be caused due to a number of reasons but typically it stems from long periods of being overworked, doing repetitive tasks with no recognition or appreciation, and having to interact with customers that are dissatisfied and frustrated.
As a result of working in such a high-stress environment, support agents might start feeling frustrated about their job, become less interested in their work, and not perform as well as they used to.
Now let’s take a look at some of the warning signs to identify burnout and strategies on what you can do for preventing workplace burnout.
Three warning signs your customer service team needs a break
According to a study by Gallup, burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day and have 13% lower confidence in their performance. And according to Deloitte’s Workplace Burnout Survey, nearly 50% of respondents have already left jobs due to burnout issues.
But the hard part is that you cannot measure burnout easily. So it is important that you pay close attention to your customer support agents and their behavior to spot signs of burnout. These are the common symptoms you can look out for:
- Team members losing focus – 91% of respondents of Deloitte’s Workplace Burnout Survey say that high stress or frustration has negatively impacted the quality of their work. If your team’s workload doesn’t reduce despite working long hours, chances are, they’re burned out.
- Increasing customer complaints – Negative employee emotions will reflect in all parts of your business – especially in your customer service. If your reps are always overworked and anxious, customer interactions will be affected. Keep an eye out on dropping customer satisfaction levels and increase in customer complaints – these may be signs that your team is facing burnout.
- Dropping productivity – Customer service jobs are tough. Your team members are constantly fire-fighting. Due to the nature of their work, your reps might start feeling that they are not valued enough. This feeling of insignificance can lead to reduced motivation and productivity.
Now that you know how to identify burnout, let’s look into ways you can save your team from burnout.
Strategies to prevent your customer service team from burning out
As a manager, you hold a lot of cards on how your customer support team feels at work. Small actions that you perform can go a long way in helping your team feel empowered and do their job better. Here are some strategies that you can take advantage of to prevent customer service burnout.
1. Understand your customers better
Take the time out to research your customer base. Create distinct personas based on specific traits and demographic information. Document the kind of usage patterns and customer support queries that come in from each type of persona.
An exercise like this will help you understand your customers better, understand their pain points, help you map out solutions to their problems, and give you a playbook to deal with them. Putting a structure to your customer responses can help reduce anxiety and thus curb burnout to an extent.
Create playbooks to deal with each persona based on your insights. Refine these playbooks over time based on real-time insights gathered from live customer interactions.
Make these playbooks searchable and available to your team members digitally so that the next time they have a difficult customer to deal with, they have a ready reckoner that tells them exactly what to do and what not to.
Further, this can also be an effective way to onboard new team members, allowing them to hit the ground running from day one.
2. Encourage regular breaks
As much as taking a break might seem like an unaffordable luxury in a demanding profession like customer service, it is a necessity. According to research, small breaks or brief diversions can help you break the monotony, focus better, and come back replenished to do your job at hand better. It doesn’t need to be a long break. A short break for a coffee, walk or some fun games would do.
Most modern helpdesks even allow team members to take small breaks by letting them control their availability. For instance, with Hiver, agents can simply click on the toggle switch to change their status from online to offline and vice versa. In such situations, the helpdesk will route incoming queries to other agents available to serve customers.
3. Have regular, candid 1:1 meetings
Time is a precious commodity for most customer service professionals. You’re always fire-fighting or chasing down a hard deadline. Under such conditions, it is quite possible that your team won’t have the time to have 1:1 conversations with you to air their grievances.
And that’s why it is best to schedule time for these 1:1 meetings. These can be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly depending on your comfort level. But it is important to make sure that these are on the calendar and aren’t skipped unless, of course, there are some other pressing things to attend to.
While it’s good to keep these meetings simple and free-flowing, it might help to have a meeting template – a structure/set of questions to ask so as to make the most out of these meetings.
Here’s a simple template that you can use to have effective 1:1 meetings to allow your teammates to let go of their frustrations, understand their challenges, and come up with a plan to counter them.
4. Allow for a much higher level of team collaboration
Dealing with employee burnout individually can be daunting, but it becomes a little easier when your team works collaboratively. Customer service is quite like a team sport. Every individual might have their respective strengths and weaknesses, but when they come together, the whole department starts to work like a well-oiled machine. Response and resolution times go down, customer satisfaction scores go up, and as a result of this, their stresses get alleviated.
When your team collaborates, it makes collective knowledge available and makes the team a stronger entity.
Collaboration brings the team closer, helps build bonds, and eases up the working climate.
Hiver allows users to collaborate using built-in notes seamlessly. These notes have a chat-like functionality and can be found right beside the email threads. What’s more? Well, they are searchable as well.
5. Empower your team
Customer service, due to its nature, can become a little tedious and repetitive. And this can lead to boredom and frustration among your reps.
One way to help your team break out of the monotony is to allow them to have a certain degree of freedom.
For instance, you can allow them to make modifications to their customer service scripts and bring in their unique flavor to problem-solving.
Give them a certain level of authority to make decisions that are right for the customers without consulting their superiors.
Small measures like these can help break the monotony associated with customer service and keep burnout at bay.
6. Support your customer service team
Customer service employees are often at the receiving end of customer complaints and deal with angry customers. And that’s why they might feel like their job is a thankless one. This lack of appreciation might make them feel unvalued, leading to stress and eventually burnout.
Small gestures of appreciation like meal kit subscriptions, and spa coupons can go a long way in helping them feel motivated to carry on with their jobs. Make sure to appreciate your team and tell them how they contribute to the organization’s larger goals.
Celebrate career milestones, help them chart their career paths, institute a rewards system and give them small but meaningful rewards in categories such as ‘Best team player,’ ‘most number of tickets resolved,’ ‘highest customer satisfaction,’ etc.
Try and get them access to the best in mental health. Having an on-call counselor on board whom employees can periodically talk with is an idea worth considering.
Try getting them subscriptions to apps such as Headspace or Calm that allow them to practice mindfulness to alleviate stress.
7. As managers, please keep the work-life balance
A large factor that contributes to burnout is work stress. Once you turn off your computer and head home, consider completely tuning out of work.
Remember that you set the tone for what your team does. So if your teammates see you maintaining a healthy work-life balance, they’ll follow suit, knowing that it is okay for them to do so as well.
If you’re distracted by your devices, consider using something like the new notification modes available on Apple devices with iOS 15, allowing you to separate notifications from apps under different profiles such as ‘Work,’ ‘Personal,’ and ‘Sleep.’
8. Upgrade your customer service tech stack
Today, the market is brimming with customer service software. Depending on your needs and your budget, there is something for everyone. So do your research and pick the best tool in your budget.
Moving to a helpdesk like Hiver can help improve workplace productivity and efficiency significantly. It comes with all the features you need, but most importantly, it works right out of your favorite tool — Gmail. This means you don’t have to train your team members to use another tool, and they don’t need to switch screens constantly.
Keeping everything in one place can save your team a lot of time and thus reduce the pressure that comes with customer service.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What are the common signs of burnout in customer service professionals?
Common signs include a lack of enthusiasm about work, reduced engagement levels, irritability with clients or colleagues, and physical symptoms such as fatigue or headaches.
2. What steps can a manager take to help an employee experiencing burnout?
Managers can help by acknowledging the employee’s feelings, offering professional support such as counseling, adjusting their workload, providing opportunities for skill development, and encouraging time off to rest and recuperate.
3. How does customer service burnout impact the overall business?
Burnout can lead to a high employee turnover and lower productivity. This, in turn, has a negative impact on the support customers receive from your business, potentially harming your bottomline.
4. Are certain times of year more challenging for customer service staff, increasing burnout risk?
Yes, things can get challenging during time periods where the volume of customer queries increase exponentially. This usually happens during a sale or holiday.
5. How do customers impact employee burnout?
Regularly dealing with hostile or angry customers can escalate stress levels for customer support agents. That’s why it is important to train support staff on how to tactfully handle these interactions, and also ensure they feel supported at work.
Wrapping up
When it comes to burnout in customer service, the biggest factor that can keep it at bay is creating the right work environment.
For managers, your voice and leadership can set the tone. Empower your employees, hold team-building activities, create a friendly atmosphere where your employees can speak up without the fear of being reprimanded, allow them to take time off, reward them, celebrate small wins, and get them the best technology that you can afford.
And finally, Most importantly, invest in long-term relationships with your team members, ones that go beyond mere transactional ones.
Resources you’ll love:
- Commbox’s post on reasons for agent burnout
- A detailed guide by Indeed on how to deal with rude customers
- An infographic by Lorman on identifying employee burnout
- 7 Tips for Agent Self-Care by Kustomer
- 7 Ways for Neurodivergents to Succeed in Customer Support and Avoid Burnout
