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Contact center agent burnout is an increasingly serious issue in customer service. As the world becomes more digital, agents see their workload demands increasing. As stress builds up, so can burnout.
Contact center agent burnout negatively impacts agents, customers and the call center itself. Polomi Batra, director of product marketing, and Nazli Camlibel, senior product marketing manager, both at Zendesk, talked to CMSWire about the rise of agent burnout, its unwanted effects and how companies can utilize AI technology to create a healthier work environment for agents.
Causes of Agent Burnout
Many trends have impacted agent burnout in recent years. For one, repetitive and mundane interactions are the type of customer request that take up the most of agents’ time, Batra said. As a result, agents feel exhausted and bored from doing the same manual tasks constantly. They likely need to repeat similar information over and over again to different customers throughout their shift. The lack of interesting, complex tasks can contribute greatly to agent burnout. When agents finally get the chance to deal with more engaging, complicated issues, they may not have enough time or energy to manage the interaction as successfully as they’d like.
Another major cause of burnout is agents’ lack of a unified view of their work, Camlibel said. Many agents rely on multiple tools and solutions to support and keep track of customers, and they often have to master these tools on their own. Monitoring so many tools can increase agents’ stress levels, which in turn escalates burnout.
Ultimately, burnout can have negative impacts on both customers and agents. “Burnout can make you tired [and] make you less motivated to do your job. It can also create more apathetic feelings towards the customers you’re serving instead of being more empathetic toward them,” Batra said.
Burnout contributes to the generally high turnover rate that contact centers and other businesses in the service industry experience. When agents quit because of stress, contact centers need to spend the time, energy and money to replace them. Ultimately, addressing burnout and making the agent experience less stressful will help centers keep agents longer.
The Impact of Empathy Fatigue
When they experience burnout, agents may have trouble showing empathy to every customer they interact with, Batra said. This is known as “empathy fatigue.” In theory, agents should respond to each customer with the same energy — a helpful, empathetic and enthusiastic attitude. But burnout leads to increasing amounts of apathy in agents, an unideal result for someone in the customer service industry.
A major reason empathy fatigue occurs is because agents consistently do not have the tools they need to manage customer interactions, Batra said. With the right tools, agents can focus their mental energy on showing care for the customer. She stressed the importance of tools that provide agents with “timely context, a unified view and insight into what actions they can take to serve the customer immediately. Those sorts of technologies are tools that can help agents sort of reduce burnout.”
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AI as a Solution for Burnout
Interest in artificial intelligence has exploded in the past year with the introduction of ChatCPT and other AI technologies. Certain AI capabilities have the potential to solve many of the causes of agent burnout. For example, many tools can give agents the context of a customer interaction, such as the history of a customer’s experience with the company and advice on what to say and what steps to take next, Batra said. What’s also important is that contact centers look for a solution with a unified view of everything, so that agents can understand customers immediately and respond quickly.
Sentiment analysis is another key AI feature, Batra said. For example, at Zendesk, AI can identify the sentiment of an incoming request. If there is an upset customer who wants a refund, Zendesk will automatically route them to an available agent with expertise in refund escalations.
“This gives the agent the tool to deal with the situation based on what they’re facing,” she said. “How they deal with the conversation will be a lot more empathetic if they have that sentiment analysis.”
Finally, she gave an example of how AI can help agents respond quickly and appropriately to customers. Zendesk uses AI in a way that allows agents to click a button and immediately change the tone of their answer. Combined with sentiment analysis, this helps agents respond appropriately based on a customer's mood.
Explore Your Options for AI Solutions
By using AI to transform the agent experience, Zendesk helps contact centers productively counter rising stress and burnout. Batra and Camlibel both have a forward-looking attitude toward AI. They said it’s important to think about how AI and agents will interact over time. For now, agents are in charge, and AI is a helper. However, by adopting the right technology, contact centers can transform how work is done and consistently reduce the more burdensome parts of agents’ jobs.
“[AI] gives agents more meaning to their work,” Batra said. “They're focused on fewer but more complex cases that they're trying to solve, and they don't feel overwhelmed and burdened by the unending pile of requests that they have to reach every single day — because now they have a companion to help them out with that.”
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Learn about how Zendesk uses AI to optimize customer service here!
