Stress Hurts Call Centre Employees and the Customer Experience: Jacada Study 

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Jacada, a provider of AI and RPA powered virtual assistants, recently released key insights on why contact centre employees are stressed and how their stress negatively affects the customer experience.

“We wanted to get an unfiltered, insider look into how contact centre employees view their roles, what their pain points are, and what solutions they feel could help them consistently deliver great customer experiences,” said Kumaran Shanmuhan, Chief Growth Officer at Jacada.

There have been many studies that document the state of the contact centre and the mental health of contact centre agents during the pandemic. Rather than run another survey, Jacada sought to analyse conversations between contact centre employees on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Quora. It then used the stories it collected, along with key statistics and supporting research, to create an illustrative snapshot of call centre life.

Jacada reports that contact centre employees are increasingly resorting to social networks to vent and to seek help from peers. 

Online communities that enable call centre workers to commiserate on their struggles and share best practices have grown by 77 per cent in membership and by 75 per cent in daily conversations since January 2020.

Also Read: Is Automation Killing the Contact Centre?

Key Findings 

• Customers are 10x more likely to recommend a brand whose employees can answer their questions
• 91 per cent of call center agents are likely to quit their jobs in 2021†
• 41 per cent cite stress and burnout as their reason to leave

Findings reveal fundamental issues with how contact centers operate today, covering a wide range of knowledge management and workforce engagement management topics such as hiring, onboarding, training, quality management, performance management, and coaching.

“Increasingly, companies listen to their customers on social media, but what about their employees?” Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics, asks. “As Jacada has done with this research, it turns out that agents are quite clear about conditions and practices that prevent them from doing their jobs well. Instead of tuning them out, if companies lean in and listen, they can actually learn a lot about how to make the employee experience better, which in turn creates a better customer experience.”