4 Research-based Principles for Preventing Service Agent Burnout
This article was co-written with Fatemeh Khatibloo and Nicholas Feinig.
In the shift to a success-from-anywhere environment, a lot has changed in how businesses serve their customers. But one thing hasn’t changed: consumers regularly rely on customer service agents for help resolving problems as simple as a password reset to those as complex as navigating an insurance claim.
And now a new, pandemic-driven challenge is facing businesses: The “Great Resignation.” A recent Salesforce survey found that 71% of customer service agents have considered leaving their job in the past six months — with 69% expressing interest in leaving the customer service industry altogether.
At the center of this phenomenon is a key question: how can companies create human-centric contact centers that achieve positive business outcomes and agent satisfaction in a radically changed industry?
The pandemic has changed contact center work
In late 2021, we set out to understand how the experiences of contact center agents and supervisors had changed over the prior 18 months. We conducted in-depth interviews and workshops with 40 agents and supervisors from a range of industries and company sizes. We asked both groups about the shift to remote work, the new technologies their employers were using, and how those tools affected their day-to-day work. Here’s what we learned from the two groups:
- Human-centric service matters deeply to agents. Customer service agents often work on complex and challenging cases. As a result, they really want to work for companies that respect employee experience dimensions like mastery, autonomy, opportunity, and dignity. They want supervisors to trust them to solve customer problems, and to be available when they need help. They want opportunities for upskilling and training. And, like most people, they want a little bit of grace for the challenges that come with remote work.
- Supervisors still struggle with remote team management. Most of the supervisors we spoke with care deeply about the well-being of their teams, but struggle to strike a balance when their agents are no longer sitting on a floor in front of them. New technologies can empower some agents while overwhelming others; likewise, metrics like call time are harder to gauge when the calls reaching agents are often more complicated than they were pre-pandemic. And, supervisors lamented that it’s just harder to know when an agent is struggling on a given day.
Four Principles for Including Agents in Human-Centric Service
As we analyzed the data, we identified patterns and themes that form the core of our four principles for engaging agents in human-centric customer service. These principles can help companies empower agents, meet customer needs, and adapt to the changes driving the Great Resignation.
- Center on Agent Experiences.
Focus on contact center technology use cases that help agents find, generate, and store information but that don’t get in the way of what the agents do best: creating positive customer interactions. - Build Trust with Transparency
Give supervisors the right tools to monitor and measure productivity, without robbing agents of flexibility and autonomy. Be clear about when agents are being tracked, and why. - Evolve Your KPIs to Fit the Moment
Avoid over-reliance on metrics that may not be appropriate for a remote setting or don’t tell the complete story of an interaction. Routinely evaluate what you measure and why. - Train Intentionally
Develop a training program that gives new remote agents confidence to handle difficult situations, and provide opportunities for upskilling and positive feedback throughout a shift.
Principle #1: Center on agent experiences.
As the brand’s “voice” in customer interactions, contact center agents are essential to the customer experience. But as companies deploy technologies that can have a negative effect on agent experience, which may have contributed to unprecedented attrition rates in contact centers. Consider AI and automation: these technologies are increasingly effective at handling simple cases, like password resets and changes of address, but they can lead to frustration when deployed poorly or in a complex workflow. Moreover, customers crave empathetic interactions when they seek help:
“[AI is] supposed to be the future,” one agent reflected in our interviews,”but I see that my customers still want the human connection… I see that my customers still want to pick up the phone and reach me.”
In fact, some automation flows meant to speed up simple cases can have the opposite effect, as one agent explained. “We have a feature on our website that they can click to send us a note. However, if the note is something that the system doesn’t recognize, which seems to be about 80% of the time, they get an email stating that they need to call us. So they call us and they wait an hour to talk to us for us to say ‘oh, well we received your email. Was there anything else you needed?’”
Other AI tools — like sentiment analysis and voice assistants — are usually deployed in the interest of better, more efficient customer service interactions. In practice, though, their promise sometimes comes alongside issues like algorithmic bias and non-diverse training data. Your agents are in the perfect position to see how flaws in technology and deployment impact the brand’s relationship with customers.
So what does it mean to “center agents?” First, include agents in the process of evaluating and testing technology. Next, acknowledge your agents’ skills and value; they aren’t just a cost center — they are a strategic pillar of your customer experience. Finally, instead of automation for automation’s sake, focus on use cases that help agents — or customers — find information to solve problems. Whether automated or not, the goal is the same: the best interaction for the customers and the agents.
#2: Build trust with transparency.
There is a crisis of trust in contact centers today. Agents often can’t tell how they are being evaluated or when they’re being monitored; one agent said, ”[Supervisors] are not transparent about which calls they will be listening in to. When [we were onsite] they would do side by sides.” Meanwhile, supervisors told us they can’t always tell if a remote agent is on-task or worse, “if they are doing dishes while they’re on a call.”
Measuring adherence (the percentage of time agents adhere to their assigned schedules) and call monitoring for training and quality are fundamental to call center management. But some of these practices — and others like click-tracking and video-monitoring — can leave remote agents feeling like they are being surveilled in their own homes. Conversely, agents should be able to communicate their individual remote work situations and needs. One agent with twin toddlers said “… at any given moment I may need to assist them and I may need to quickly put a customer on hold if the kids are in the background screaming. Sometimes I wish the company was a little more lenient…” She went on to say that she was considering other employment options as a result.
Call center managers need to address the trust crisis to reduce attrition. When exploring additional monitoring, consider the impact that it might have on agents’ sense of dignity, autonomy, purpose, and ability to demonstrate mastery. Make it clear, whenever possible, that a call is being monitored, and incentivize supervisors to provide feedback in a timely manner. Provide clear evaluation metrics, with actionable tips to improve performance. And recognize that remote agents face new challenges — from hardware problems and internet connectivity issues to sub-optimal workspaces — and encourage them to communicate these issues so you can troubleshoot them together.
#3: Evolve your Key Performance Indicators to fit the moment.
While metrics are essential to drive, understand, and articulate business results, they rarely paint a complete picture and their value can change over time. Customer Satisfaction scores, for example, are important for benchmarking, but can have a different meaning if, say, a customer was already frustrated by a chatbot by the time they’re routed to a live agent. Ensure that you are reviewing what you measure, how you measure, and what each metric means in context.
Over-reliance on certain metrics can also penalize agents for a job well done. One agent described their experience with “first call resolution” (FCR) — whether the agent can close a case with one call. “I think of it from the consumer POV, even if they’re calling me about specific fraud that might be occurring, if I see something else that’s going on with their account, I want to assist and I want to give them all that information.” That interaction might build customer loyalty, but FCR scores can’t capture that.
Supplement the usual metrics with outcomes-based measures. For example, in addition to “average call time” you might also assess an agent’s impact on customer lifetime value. Another simple, but effective metric might include a relative feedback system, where agents and supervisors both score a call, then discuss its outcome and opportunities for improvement.
#4: Train intentionally.
Training in a remote context can be exhausting — for agents and for their trainers. New hires used to get hands-on training experience, and could lean on experienced agents for shadowing and advice before handling calls solo. Today, most learn in large groups and entirely online. One agent told us they “had 88 people in a Zoom meeting, and the instructor had to keep stopping to remind people not to talk over others.”
As a result, said one supervisor, “It’s getting harder to retain people because they get half the training we used to give them. “What used to be 8 weeks is now 2–4, and [it’s] all over Zoom.” Opportunities for upskilling and real-time “teachable moments” have slipped, too. One agent told us that “It’s more difficult for people who are hands-on learners now because it’s from home, and you don’t have one on one type of training,” and that results in new agents feeling ill-prepared for difficult calls.
To offset some of these challenges, look for ways to use technology in your favor. For example, create a buddy system for new agents to get collaboration-as-training. Consider using your existing monitoring tools to let remote agents shadow someone more experienced. Make upskilling part of your intraday management — provide short digital training modules that teach a new product or skill, for example, and incentivize completion of those modules.
Takeaway
At Salesforce, we believe that taking a human-centric approach to contact center management is critical for business success. Use these four principles to improve agent, supervisor, and customer experiences, while future-proofing your contact center against more disruption. Focus on the people at the heart of the process — in the end, it’s connections between people that solve problems and create opportunities to succeed. To learn more, check out the Salesforce User Research Program, which drove these insights, and our commitment to Ethical and Inclusive Products. Plus, stay tuned for more content that explores insights, emerging trends, and solutions for the challenges of today’s business ethics landscape.
Thank you to collaborators Fatemeh Khatibloo, Nicholas Feinig, as well as Rayce Smallwood, Rob Katz, Yoav Schlesinger, Paula Goldman, Adam Doti, Ryan Nichols, and Mayte Zavaleta.
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