Hot Picks
Is Call Centre Burnout Real?
Chapter 1 of the Telephone Staff Burnout Workbook
Is burnout for real or is it a figment of our imaginations? A sneaky way for telephone staff to get the day off or a management tool to excuse the poor performane of certain individuals?
Well, the indications are that burnout is a real phenomenon, and experience suggests it is treatable if not curable.
Pyschologists Maslach and Johnson described burnout as "a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals doing people work".
But what does it look like - how can you see it?
Well, another team of pyschologists, Blimes & Sproat, claim the result of burnout is "the inability of callers, through frustration and boredom, to continue making solicitation calls productively."
Most of us will have seen a telephone agent who just seems to have "lost it," taking up space in the call centre but seemingly unable to break through a paralysing fog. That's burnout.
Returning to Maslach and Jackson's description, out experience at Hotlines UK has identified a number of behaviours that confirm their research:
- Emotional exhaustion results in telephone staff behaving out of character in the call centre.
- Depersonalisation results in the loss of telephone staff's self-esteem, creating grooming and hygiene problems.
- Productivity drops or stalls altogether
- Timekeeping and attendance suffer
- Motivation vanishes
- The agent ceases to deliver sufficient value to the business
The last point is the most serious from a management perspective.
The agent suffering burnout will gradually make fewer dialings or handle fewer calls, have lower quality dialogues and be less successful at achieving the goals of the calling.
In a telesales environment, he or she is likely to become less adept at closing sales and often gives up on objection handling.
In appointment setting the telephone agent ends up having "nice chats" but not generating appointments - and credit chasing staff simply fail to bring in the money.
So what is the size of the problem?
Perhaps the simplest way of beginning to quantify it is in a telesales environment.
A study of the telesales staff at the San Diego Symphony by Dr Cynthia L. Hamberg indicates that burnout can result in a 70% drop in sales performance over time.
If we take a telesales team of 10 agents, each targeted with selling £10,000 worth of business per month, we should expect at least £100,000 worth of sales.
But if one agent per month is at the bottom of the burnout curve, we risk selling only £93,000 worth.
The annualised impact of the problem would be a sales shortfall of £84,000.
So the numbers are starting to look serious. Imagine if you had 100 telephone staff!
The same study also indicated that burnout does not suddenly manifest itself.
Indeed, Dr Hamberg's data seem to indicate that burnout occurs on a gradual basis, with a slight but ongoing drop in performance. So call centre managers may not immediately recognise the symptoms and may therefore fail to deal with them in a timely manner.
In fact, it is not uncommon for us to convice ourselves that the downturn in performance is a temporary blip caused by local market conditions or the fact that other things are going on in the agent's life that will soon sort themselves out.
And because the decline in the agent's performance is gradual, we sometimes fail to notice them dropping down the league table. In fact, someimes we're glad to have a change in the positions.
