Customers Are Abusing Your Agents. Here’s What To Do About It
With Deepak Selvaratnam, Founder and COO of Snapshotz & Remotability
Show Notes
Deepak Selvaratnam is the founder and COO of Snapshotz and Remotability, which has more than 10 years of validated data on how to improve the mental health of contact centre team members.
Today, he shares what to do about the abuse your agents face from customers.
Deepak’s Top 3 Tips For Addressing Agent Abuse:
Define the levels of abuse that customer agents face, so they can be trained and supported accordingly (07:57).
There’s technology available to understand customer nuances and why they’re upset. Take advantage of it, so you can better support your agents (08:17).
Make your centres aware of any issues - whether external or internal to the organisation - which are impacting customers. That way, a defense can be formed for angry customer calling about the issue (08:43).
You'll Learn:
What ‘emotional labour’ is, and how it damages agent mental health, and craters their motivation (04:05).
The 2 common reasons why customers are abusive (04.19).
The shocking percentage of organisations which haven’t taken the first step to addressing agent abuse (05:39).
The critical skill gap that’s stopping agents from better handling abuse (10:35).
The problem you face if you have an outsourced contact centre, and what to do about it (07:03).
A simple and effective way to identify what’s missing to better support your agents (09:44).
Connect with Deepak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepak-selvaratnam-b8182a11/
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Performance Improvement System helps contact centres achieve their operational efficiency goals.
Today I'm joined by Deepak Selvaratnam, who is the Chief Operating Officer for Snapshotz, which has more than 10 years of validated data on how to improve the mental health of contact centre team members.
So Deepak, welcome along. Good to have you here.
Deepak Selvaratnam (00:32)
Thank you, Blair. Good to chat again.
Blair Stevenson (00:36)
Great. So just to start, tell us briefly about yourself and your expertise.
Deepak Selvaratnam (00:43)
I started like lots of other people, accidentally in the contact centre world 15 years ago, where I was asked to set up a contact centre because I felt bored with my job, and I did. And ever since, I've never looked back because caring is part of what I've been doing over the years.
And so in 2007, I saw the contact centre industry going to the cloud, and we went to the cloud in 2009, and we launched Snapshotz, which is the audit and benchmarking tool for contact centres. We're now in about 35 countries and 3000 plus customers.
What is important is that the Snapshotz tool aligns itself to the ISO 18295 customer service standard, as well as all the other digital standards that are globally published. And today, the challenge between digital and traditional channels are all merging, and bringing that together is part of the Snapshotz tool.
But importantly, a key core philosophy of ours - and a fundamental philosophy of all contact centres - is health and safety in the contact centre, and mental health and safety. And it’s exacerbated by the fact that many of us are remote working.
And so we combined all of that to be able to deliver an easy health check for any contact centre leader to use, so that they can get a quick understanding of where they sit, what are the challenges for them, and how they sit in terms of the rest of the world.
And importantly, we want relevancy. So we want stuff that's happening today, yesterday, and that's what Snapshotz is able to deliver.
Blair Stevenson (02:27)
Awesome, so taking a look at your data, what do contact centre leaders need to know about the mental health of their frontline agents, based on the data that you've got?
Deepak Selvaratnam (02:36)
One key issue that's coming out, Blair, is that we need to understand this concept called 'emotional labour'.
And what emotional labour means is that when a contact centre agent is constantly faced with angry customers, everyday stuff, and at times abusive customers, you need to put up a professional face. But you begin to build stress within, because what you're saying is not what you're feeling.
And that continues to build hour after hour, day after day. And that is a key aspect that contact centre leaders need to understand.
Blair Stevenson (03:26)
Yeah, because people would normally go into fight or flight. They'd either push back - like in everyday life - or they would leave the situation. But agents don't have that choice. So they've got that feeling going on inside, but they have to act professionally.
Deepak Selvaratnam (03:44)
Indeed, indeed. And the second aspect that is coming out of our stats is that contact centre leaders need to define the different levels of abuse. Ranging from an angry customer to the completely verbally abusive, personally abusive customer, and the responses there.
Blair Stevenson (04:12)
With that in mind, what are you noticing are the types of abuses that frontline agents are experiencing?
Deepak Selvaratnam (04:19)
There are the angry customers, where they are angry because the organisation hasn't delivered to their expectations. Generally, they are waiting a long time to get through to the organisation.
But there's also the issue that agents are sometimes at fault, and probably either they're not trained well or they're not responding adequately. And so the challenge for the organisation is to be able to understand the context in which the abuse happens.
There's also at the other end of it, the angry, abusive customer who is verbally abusive. And verbal abuse hurts lot harder and cuts much deeper than a knife. And that's something we really need to be able to define, so that we can actually respond to the different levels of customer abuse.
Blair Stevenson (05:29)
So if you kind of think about the data, what are your concerns about the extent to which organisations are actually addressing this issue of agent abuse?
Deepak Selvaratnam (05:39)
Well, the important step here is that 88% of organisations do not define the different levels of abuse that customer service agents face. It's defining what those levels of abuse are.
Blair Stevenson (05:59)
Okay. So what do you think that organisations should do about this?
Deepak Selvaratnam (06:04)
Firstly, they definitely need to define what these levels of abuse are.
Secondly, they actually need to train to support agents to respond to angry and abusive customers. They need to train.
Thirdly, what they need to do is they need to make sure that they actually provide customer service agents with professional support after having encountered abusive tirades from customers. And oftentimes, we leave it to the frontline supervisor who may not be a trained counsellor.
So we need to be able to ensure that we've got the right professional support to support these agents, regardless of whether they are your own agents, or whether they are outsourced.
There's an incredible groundswell of agents who work for outsourcers that are constantly facing abuse from their customers' customers. And so we definitely need to provide them with that professional support. Because after all, they're supporting your brand.
Blair Stevenson (07:23)
Yeah, exactly. And the reality is, we don't tolerate abuse within the organisation, thank goodness. And it's inappropriate to tolerate abuse from external to the organisation, with customers abusing your agents.
If you were making a suggestion to a contact centre leader about the first three steps they could take to address this issue of agent abuse, what would those first three steps be?
Deepak Selvaratnam (07:57)
Tip #1 (07:57)
First of all, it goes without saying, one really needs to understand the context in which emotional dissonance, emotional labour happens, which means defining what that is. If you define what that is, then you can as a first step, train to it and support it.
Tip #2 (08:17)
Secondly, there's technology available to be able to understand customer nuances, and analytics that can help you. So we need to be able to harness the technology that's readily available today, to be able to support our agents, and also our customer experience.
Tip #3 (08:43)
Thirdly, what is important is that we need to be proactive rather than reactive. And what that means is, the customer service agent needs to be made aware of any external issues impacting the organisation.
So if there's a new policy or a process or a new law that's coming in, that's going to impact customers - if there's a new law that canines need to have collars, whatever it is that's coming in - they need to be made well aware of it. Be proactive so that they don't face an angry customer.
(09:17)
If there is a supply chain issue, they need to be made aware. So they need to understand what are the challenges internally. And they need to be able to say if there are technology issues that are impacting service delivery, whether there are other parts of the organisation impacting service delivery, they need to be made aware so that we can form a defense, support them and form a defense for them.
We also need to make sure that once we've got these processes in place, we need to make sure that we engage with them, for them to actually be able to tell us how we as an organisation can be proactive. And that engagement is pretty crucial for their mental health.
So if you put these few factors together, understanding it, training them, ensuring that you're using the right technology, being proactive rather than reactive, we are going a long way toward supporting their mental health, keeping them longer in the role to be motivated. And especially if they're working remotely.
These are key issues that we now need to understand and consider, to achieve mental health for your front-liners.
Blair Stevenson (10:35)
Agreed. Wonderful. Thank you for that. Really appreciate you coming on the show. For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes of the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Deepak on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepak-selvaratnam-b8182a11/), you'll find a link to his LinkedIn profile in those show notes as well.
Further, if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonblair/) or connect with me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blair.stevenson.980), you'll find links to my profile there as well.
Well, that's it from us today, have a productive week.