How To Relieve Stress Of Your Contact Center Employees?

More often, people do not consider the work at contact center to be highly stressful. But it is not so.

At times, customer services can be extremely tiring and stressful since these people have to handle lots of possible stressors including ineffective training, angry customers, understanding and implementing new procedures and policies of new call center software and so on.  

  
Plus, the contact center employees also have to keep an eye on meeting the quotas as well as ever-evolving technology and attending training. 

So, once in a while they too feel like blowing up their steam. So what are the ways in which you can relieve the stress of your contact center employees? Check out a few here:

1.    Understanding Employees

Effective evaluation is the first step to understanding the problems of your employees. Getting feedback from them and conversing with them on regular basis helps you to understand the mental health of your staff. 

And these steps are highly essential especially in a contact center as interacting is the only way you will be able to gauge their level of stress.

Talk to them, and try to find any signs of burnout or frustration among the employees. Importantly, try to understand, observe and speak to them and establish a better rapport. 

2.    Identifying Cause Of Stress

It is always easier to find a solution if you know its cause. When it comes to handling the stress of contact center employees try to identify their cause of stress. 

Check out whether your new call center software solutions, procedures or policies are troubling them or whether there is an issue related to workspace or animosity towards a particular employee and so on.

Try to figure out the biggest cause of stress and create a plan to at least modify or if possible fix the factors that are causing the problem.  

3.    Come Up With A Plan

Always have a plan in rough draft form for relieving the stress on the employees. As you go deeper into the problem causing stress, you can make revisions and then implement it. 

In fact, if your staff comes to know that you are flexible enough to make changes in any plan for the company taking their stress into consideration, they will support you better in your efforts. 

4.    Foster Culture of Support & Social Interaction

Find out the possibilities of fostering friendlier atmosphere inside the call center. Check out if you need more holiday parties, employee events or a workplace that is less formal.  

It is not always possible to eliminate the part that is causing stress as some factors are an integral part of the job, so you can always try to improve the mindset of the employees by coming up with some other encouraging strategies such as a great incentive plan. 

It is important that you come up with a plan that creates a positive ambiance in your company and encourages the employees to work better every day.

 Case Study

Let us discuss a case of one of the reputed Hospitality Company known as SV group. The company has several resorts and hotels across the world. For ensuring better customer service, the company hired a reputed call center company called as TeleCall.

Problem

The major task of TeleCall employees was to take care of the sightseeing planning, accommodations of the tourists and their reservations. 

But the problem was that very few employees of TeleCall were properly trained in handling the best call center software that the contact center was using.

Even though the company was using one of the latest software for its call center operations, since there was a lack of communication between the TeleCall management and the employees, the results were not as expected. 

Since SV was a big group and was the first major client for TeleCall, the company did not want to lose it. Hence they needed to come up with quick call center solutions so that the overall service and performance quality improved.

Solution

To tackle the performance issue, the TeleCall management planned to introduce a collaborative work culture in the company.  

•    They started using the team meeting as a major platform for interaction with the employees. To encourage open discussions they started organizing the team dinners. 

•    The company also invested in CRM tools so that the agent to agent interaction was more convenient and the issues could be discussed and solved with the mutual understanding.

Result

By adopting collaborative culture TeleCall managed to improve their performance and work efficiency and hence retained SV Group as its client.