Ways to Avoid Customer Service Burnouts

Back when I was a still on the front lines handling customer relation issues, I recall that motivation was very difficult to keep up. When you are faced with constant problems, one can easily lose faith in the company’s product or service.

When I assumed the role as the Director of Customer Relations at my previous company, I looked at ways to keep my staff’s motivation up.  Here are some programs I’ve implemented:

Sharing key metrics. The first thing I decided to do was to share our departmental metrics that were shared with the executive management team to my staff. I focused on the monthly improvements we’ve accomplished, especially in the return rate and the warranty rate.

Since our department was responsible for identifying the underlying cause of a return, the department was also responsible for suggesting improvements. If the return rate decreased, then it simply meant that the department was successful in identifying a root cause of a return, thereby eliminating future occurrences.

Disclosing the warranty rate played a different purpose. I understood that when looked at as a percentage, warranty issues were quite low. In fact our warranty rate was around 1.5%. Even though the department handled numerous warranty issues, I was able to illustrate that the products we offered were of higher quality.

Mixing up responsibilities. Burnouts occur because the jobs that one performs become repetitive and non-challenging. Once the company launched the “Live Chat” program I’ve made it so that my staff had an opportunity to handle “Live Chat” for a couple of weeks, and then switch back to inbounds the next. This kept things fresh.

Sharing expertise. We regularly met as a department to go over any new problems and new solutions. At these meetings, the frontline staff had the floor. I understood that we required their expertise, not the other way around. Giving them an opportunity to share their experience and suggestion reflected how we valued their expertise.

Customer service burnouts are a reality. Implementing programs to combat the loss of motivation will keep your employee retention high.