How to Avoid Burnout for Customer Service

The role of customer service in a company is at the forefront in dealing with customers. Not limited to receiving complaints, customer service must also know product information that suits customer needs.

Customer service spends more time to understand the entire process related to the product. When a problem occurs, escalation is needed to the right team so that customer complaints can be resolved immediately. For this reason, customer service is often in crisis situations which trigger burnout in the workplace.

The stress in a customer-facing work environment is something that is beyond anyone's control. This includes the situation of having to stay up late and not being careless while working. However, there are steps you can take to reduce some of the stress in order to create a healthy environment for growth.

Burnout Situations Faced by Customer Service

The hardest part of dealing with burnout is determining how to measure it. Even so, you can pay attention to several behaviors that appear to see signs of burnout, including the following.

1. Loss of focus: high levels of stress or frustration have a negative impact on the quality of work, especially when the team's workload does not decrease despite working for a long time
2. Increased customer complaints: when overworked and anxious, customer interactions will be affected by negative emotions and can be seen in a decrease in satisfaction levels and an increase in the number of customer complaints
3. Decreased productivity: the nature of customer service work is to resolve conflict so it is possible that feelings of not being appreciated enough can lead to reduced motivation and productivity.

How to Avoid Burnout for Customer Service

The work pressure experienced by the customer service team is not easy. However, there are several things a manager can do. Here are some small changes that might help customer service teams work better and avoid burnout.

1. Understand customer personas

Take time to research your customer base. Create different personas based on traits and demographic information. You can document usage patterns and questions that come from each persona type.

Exercises like this will help understand customers better, understand their problems, help map out solutions, and provide guidelines for dealing with them. Placing structure in customer responses can help reduce anxiety and thus minimize the possibility of burnout.

Create a playbook for dealing with each persona based on the information you know. Refine these guidelines over time based on real-time guidance gathered directly from customer interactions.

Make the guidelines searchable and accessible to the entire team. That way, everyone will be better prepared to deal with customers who are difficult to deal with based on what to do and what not to do.

2. Give yourself time to rest

Although taking a break may seem like a luxury for a profession that demands customer service, it is a necessity. Taking a short break or short entertainment can help relieve boredom, focus better, and get re-energized to do your job better. No need for a long break. A short break to drink coffee, go for a walk, or play games is enough.

Most modern customer service providers even allow team members to take a break by letting them control their availability. They can change status using collaboration tools so that customers can be handled in turn by other team members.

3. Make regular 1:1 reviews

Time is a very valuable thing for most customer service. You are always chasing hard deadlines to solve problems. In conditions like this, it is likely that your team does not have time to have a 1:1 conversation to convey their complaints.

For this reason, every manager needs to schedule time for 1:1 meetings. You can set it in weekly, biweekly or monthly periods. However, it is important to make sure not to miss the schedule unless there is something urgent. This agenda should be kept simple and free-flowing, but it's a good idea to prepare a clear series of questions so that the results are maximized.

4. Create a much higher level of collaboration

Overcoming burnout can be scary, but it becomes a little easier when you work collaboratively. Each individual may have their own strengths and weaknesses, but a team can collaborate for better results.

When your team collaborates, there is collective information that can make the team a stronger entity. Collaboration can not only bring teams closer, but also help build bonds, and lighten the work climate.

5. Empower your team

The nature of customer service work can be a bit boring because the routine keeps happening over and over again. This can cause boredom and frustration within a team. One way to get out of boredom is to allow yourself a certain level of freedom.

For example, you can allow them to make modifications to customer response scripts to bring a unique flavor to solving problems. Give a certain level of authority in making decisions without consulting superiors. These small steps can help minimize the monotony of the work phase.

These are some things that can be evaluated by your customer service team. Identify problems that often affect the effectiveness of team performance. Then, find solutions and get used to new workflows to keep optimizing your team's performance.