Social Media Study: Stress Hurts Call Center Employees and the Customer Experience

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

“We wanted to get an unfiltered, insider look into how contact center 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.

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There have been many studies that document the state of the contact center and the mental health of contact center agents during the pandemic. Rather than run another survey, Jacada sought to analyze conversations between contact center 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 center life.

Jacada reports that contact center employees are increasingly resorting to social networks to vent and to seek help from peers. Online communities that enable call center workers to commiserate on their struggles and share best practices have grown by 77% in membership and by 75% in daily conversations since January 2020.

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.

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“Increasingly, companies listen to their customers on social media, but what about their employees?” Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics, LLC, 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.”

In addition to the insights it’s sharing online, Jacada will be offering a guided “deep dive” into its social media findings in its July webinar, What Your Call Center Agents Rant About On Social Media. CX and contact center operations experts from Arise Virtual Solutions and Jacada will join Sheila McGee-Smith to explore the surprising insights lurking beneath the frustrations of real contact center agents.