The Matriarchs and Patriarchs

Training, coaching, and mentoring are ways that organisations can assist the development of staff.  Of the many great organisations I work with, you can tell which of them have invested time and money into their employees.  These organisations know that the return on investment in their staff far outweighs the initial outlay.

These organisations spend time, effort, and money on continually updating their work practices. However, not all staff enjoy being introduced to new ways of doing things.  There is a unique group of people who work in most organisations, these are the matriarchs and the patriarchs. 

They are the staunch women and men aged in their fifties who have worked in their particular field of expertise for the majority of their careers. Not all 50+ year old's fit into this category, just one or two. They number about one in forty of the workforce yet have a strong hold over their peers.

These people have seen plenty of change, they have dealt with every type of customer, and have been to every type of training you can name. Or so they say. 

They are reluctant to change, they want to know everything there is to know as to why they need to change, they will reject new ideas and methods of doing things, show disdain towards all performance measurement tools and have a strong ‘them and us’ attitude towards management.    

During coaching workshops they will stare fiercely out the window or at the wall while waiting for their opportunity to blast the coach with why the coach is wrong, why they are right and they know how to deal with people without help from anyone else. 

However, they do have a lot of experience and if you can get them onside they will help you to introduce new initiatives. Simply bringing in a coach for a single session won’t be enough to change their attitude, they must be regularly involved in engaging with the change-coach who will play to their ego so much so that they will believe it was their idea to make the change.      

You have to invest time with these people and show them the benefits of the initiative. They will act as the guide-stick for how well the change is embedding and will ensure groupthink is negated when they are on committees. Give them something to do to introduce the change, this will play to their ego and allow them to focus their energy on something positive.

The matriarchs and patriarchs will always be around, use them to your advantage rather than ignore them. They can make or break you, not the other way around.

I Am So Sorry!

The word 'sorry' is one that we tend to use far too often these days. It has become so common that it has lost its meaning. Additionally, when we use the word 'sorry' it has an impact on us. Let's look at how we use this word and how we can change to something else. 

If a mistake is made, we automatically say "I'm sorry". By doing so we have owned the problem. But what if it wasn't you who made the error in the first place? In my opinion you should only say sorry if you have made the mistake. Say it immediately you make the mistake and say it with honesty.

If it is not your mistake, use the word 'apologise'. This word has greater impact on the listener and is a more formal acknowledgement of the error. Plus, we don't tend to absorb the issue personally as we would if we had used the word 'sorry'. 

A common use of the word 'sorry' is when someone has told us a sad story such as "my partner has just died". Our first reaction is to usually say "I am so sorry for your loss". This is okay but are you genuinely sorry? If so, then keep using the word.  However you could try saying "I can't imagine how hard this must be for you" or "That must be hard for you" or "In the circumstances let's see if I can make this easier for you". Anything that acknowledges their emotion and you aren't saying sorry.

Don't get me wrong, if using the word 'sorry' works for you then by all means keep doing so. Remember if you do that it may be impacting on your own emotions plus if you use it all of the time it will start to sound disingenuous.

I Have Had Enough

Continuing our theme on what a call centre agent faces in their daily work, I want to talk about the worst type of call, "I am going to kill myself". It is an agent's biggest fear to hear someone say “I can’t take this anymore, I am going to kill myself.” 

Along with angry callers, these calls are increasing in frequency and are no longer associated with emergency responders or psychological counselling call centres. 

The reason for these calls is many and varied.  The main reason seems to be when the cause is associated with money.  As we have discussed in previous posts, the foundation of our hierarchy of needs is food, water, warmth, shelter, and the other basics that we need to survive.  Today you can add money to that list because without money the basic needs are difficult to obtain. 

Nonetheless, regardless of the cause of the statement it is not for agents to try and manage these types of calls.  Crisis intervention is a skill reserved for trained counsellors and particularly for law enforcement personnel if there is an immediate risk of self-harm.

When a caller makes a statement that they are going to kill themselves, the recommended course of action is to get the caller to reaffirm what they have just said.  This indicates to the caller that the agent is listening and are concerned for their safety. It also humanises the call, the caller is talking to a person and not an organisation.

Evidence shows us that by asking a person if they are considering committing suicide doesn't actually cause them to do so.  Quite the opposite in fact.  Restating their position also gives the caller time to contemplate what they have just said and allows time to retract the comment.  Often the caller will apologise and say that the comment was made out of frustration at the situation. 

The agent should nevertheless satisfy themselves that the caller is safe and escalate the call to a supervisor. 

If the caller states that they are serious about killing themselves the next question to ask would be “Is there someone there with you?”  If there is, ask to speak to that person then relay what the caller has just said to you, the agent. Again details of the call must be escalated to a supervisor.

If the caller is alone, the call must be transferred immediately to a supervisor who will ascertain the appropriate referral agency, counselling service or an emergency response service. The police is a great option as their call centre agents have robust procedures to follow and also have trained crisis intervention negotiators ready to accept a conference call of this type.

In all of these solutions, the agent must undergo a debrief/counselling session with a supervisor, welfare officer, or counsellor. Events like these take a toll on the agent and the compound impact is extremely damaging if not mitigated.

Call Centre Work is Difficult

Like most other professions, call centre work has an emotional and therefore psychological impact on staff.  More so I believe because the agent cannot see the customer hence unable to read the other person’s body-language.  

Often quoted is that 93% of communication is non-verbal.  This is untrue.  This figure arose from a study conducted by Dr. Albert Mehrabian in the 1970s.  In his narrow study he found that 7% of a message was conveyed in words, 38% through vocal elements, and 55% through non-vocal elements such as facial expressions, gestures, and body language. People incorrectly combined the 38 and 55 when of course vocal elements are part of what is being said.

What we can say from this study is that communications over the phone removes more than half of how we usually convey our message.  The figure that I work with when developing my communication programmes is that call centre agents only have 40% of our usual methods of communication.  With the use of good tone and inflection in their voice an agent can control difficult conversations.    

Call Centre work would be one of the most highly measured industries with close scrutiny on average handling and holding times, average speed of answer, average work time, call-back numbers, quality assurance checks, not to mention administration time, and roster modifications across the workday.

All of these measurements impact negatively on an agent, albeit they may not be immediately obvious.  As the agent becomes impacted they look for ways to support themselves. For example, average handling times become a target rather than a guide. They may incorrectly use administration time to delay accepting the next call is another example. Or they may skip a few steps in the recommended process in order to speed up the number of calls that they make/receive.

Over time, each of these monitoring systems plus the calls received from difficult customers adds to their bucket of stress. I was told of a senior manager who said during a safety and health presentation that their call centre was a safe place to work as there was very little to trip over, nothing to fall on workers, or much to injure themselves with except the odd paper cut.  Quite correct.  But the psychological impact is immense. 

All of the negative impacts faced daily in a call centre, if not dealt with adequately, accumulate leading to a high incidence of workplace stress. This leads to high absenteeism rates, and worse still high presenteeism rates. Presenteeism is when an employee turns up for work but isn't engaged, they are simply there physically but not mentally. This leads to poor customer service, mistakes being made, and ultimately reflects badly on the organisation.

Who would have thought answering the phone could be so difficult?

Call Centre Frustrations

I wonder if you thought that I was going to explore the frustrations that we sometimes have when we make a phone call to a call centre. Sorry to say, this post is not about your frustration, it's about the frustrations faced by call centre staff when you abuse them. This post is provided to give you a perspective from the call centre agent’s point of view.

Frustration is probably the best single word to describe workplace stress in a call centre.  Frustration at the caller who isn't comprehending what they are being told, frustration at not seeing their work completed when they have to hand the call over to another agent, frustration at colleagues who didn't do their job well-enough in the first place, frustration at being overly supervised, and frustration at the numerous performance measures implemented to monitor their work. 

Add to this the challenging people who call; the angry, the sad, the talkers, the swearers, and those who just won’t listen.  If not dealt with adequately, this continual frustration will lead to workplace stress. 

Stress is probably not something that you would associate with a call centre unless you have worked in one.  Compared with other professions, call centres have a higher than average staff turnover rate, higher than average presenteeism, and higher than average absenteeism. Who would have thought, all they do is to answer the phone isn’t it? Anyone can do that can’t they? No and no, they do much more than that.

Can you imagine going to work with the intention of helping people and all you get for your effort is to be screamed at by the very people you are trying to help? Depending on the type of call centre and the role within it, an agent can expect to be yelled at every 1 in 10 calls they receive. That would be unacceptable in any other industry. 

The way these abusive calls were handled in early times was to simply hang-up the phone. In today's environment, that is not only forbidden it causes more problems than it solves. The disgruntled caller is now likely to complain about your actions, harbour a grudge, tell all of their friends about how bad your company is, and return even more enraged as they fester on how badly they were treated.

I like the saying; "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar". What this phrase is actually referring to is that when you're trying to accomplish something, you'll have more success by being polite rather than being rude. 

The next time that you have to phone a call centre, be nice to the agent and watch what happens.