Working in a Call Centre is not for the Faint-Hearted

Working in a call centre is not for the faint hearted. The environment can be stressful and challenging. Customers don’t call to pass the time of day or enquire about your health, they call because something is not working the way it should work which can be having a huge impact on their business, increasing urgency and most likely elevating the calmest demeanour.

The challenge: To serve each customer quickly, professionally, constructively and with empathy, following a certain logic. The combination of anxious customer and working logically through the technical issue may not always result in the expected outcome. Why?

Whenever faced with someone who is emotionally fragile and anxious going straight in to resolve the issue, may not bring expected results and this is where support centre personnel often fall short. The main reasons for this:

1. The system of measuring call time and using it as a key performance indicator (KPI) puts pressure on the agent who because they are conscious of meeting this KPI immediately jump into problem solving. I understand this is what the customer has called for, but not at the cost of ignoring customer feelings in relation to the problem in discussion.
2. Responding with logic to a person who is emotionally charged results in miscommunication and misunderstanding. The customer wants to be heard on all levels – “this is me and how I feel right now”, as well as this is the situation that is causing frustration, upset and perhaps even anger. In other words, they want to feel secure in the knowledge that someone cares about them as well as resolving the technical problem. Logic never cares! It deals with facts, processes, statistics etc, but not emotions.

Looking deeper into the second point, the agent focuses on the problem and listens only for the facts and what has been tried or done but doesn’t hear the person who is desperate to know they are in the right place, and everything will be just fine.

The customer is emotional about the problem and in this state is unlikely to be listening eQectively due to their own agenda and perhaps even “practiced” dialogue before coming on the call and therefore may not be answering agent questions in a logical manner. Furthermore, the questioning might drive annoyance that so many questions are being asked – feeding the instability of the conversation as well as the situation. The likely outcome – the customer asks for the issue to be escalated to a more senior engineer or a manager.

Result – a bewildered and frustrated agent who has more customers to take care of on their shift, and an angry, possibly irate, but certainly emotional customer who is completely dissatisfied and ready for the next victim on which they can download their emotions, making it doubly diQicult to solve the actual issue and reason why the customer called in the first place.

Excellent and professional customer service whether in a call centre or somewhere else takes investment of time and money to develop through training, learning and practice in the agent’s work role of communicating assertively and with emotional intelligence when faced with customers who are emotionally invested in the outcome. Making this investment results in agents who are professional, friendly and eQective in solving the technical issues for each customer while being motivated and grounded through self- confidence and a toolbox of emotional intelligence skills – relationship management, self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy. The ROI completion of calls within the key performance indicator time limit, happy customers and a skilled workforce.