The UK has recently introduced some new legislation affecting customer service.
specifically, an amendment has been included in the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which aims to provide new legal protections for customer-facing employees and reduce hostility towards customer-facing personnel through tougher penalties.
Here we must applaud the work of UK CEO Jo Causon Institute for Customer Service, for her tireless work for both agents and higher standards of service. The incorporation of the amendment was the culmination of two years of campaigning based on their Service with respect initiative.
The inclusion of this amendment has been prompted by the increasing abuse that customer service personnel have faced in recent years.
The worrying thing is that the level of abuse is still increasing.
Shouting on the phone
In a recently published research, The Institute of Customer Service found that in the past six months, 45% of frontline service personnel have experienced customer hostility, a 10% increase since February this year.
In addition, the survey found that more than a third (34%) of the 1,200 customer-facing employees they surveyed expected their role to become even more challenging over the next six months, driven by customer concerns about rising energy prices and increases in costs. of livelihood.
As if that weren’t enough, the prospect of heightened hostility is leading to 40% of agents reporting that they are considering leaving their position. On top of the industry’s traditionally high turnover rates, this is likely to undermine service levels and further exacerbate the situation.
It is important to point out that the UK is not alone in this. Other countries, such as the US, are seeing similar trends. Recent research by means of as quickly as possible found that more than 8 out of 10 customer service reps report having dealt with verbally abusive customers in the past few months.
But while the amendment’s arrival in the UK is good news, it is not a solution. If a company or individual has to resort to legislation to seek redress for every abuse they have faced, it is already too late and the damage has already been done.
This points to a failure for me.
A failure of organizational management and leadership to:
Train their people to deal with abusive or difficult customers. Too many agents report feeling unprepared or receiving alone ‘volatile advice on how to deal with abusive customers’ during their training.
To rest their people with the right tools and insights to prepare them and help them identify frustrated, angry and potentially abusive customers. For example, the technology is now so advanced that it can be used to determine whether a caller has contacted the company recently, how many times they have tried, at what times and what their “mood” might be.
Sam Richardson, Principal Visioneering Consultant at Twilionotes: “Many contact center agents — and the companies they work for — do a great job in challenging environments. But in a high-pressure environment, companies’ technology structures need to balance the human and the digital to better handle these situations, where technology is being used to make life easier for the operator and customer rather than creating hurdles that frustrate both parties.”
To organize their people in such a way as to help them deal with difficult and abusive customers.
It is not uncommon for an agent to take time to decompress and recover after handling an abusive call. But current work patterns often don’t provide enough time or space for decompression or recovery time. This comes into sharp focus when you consider that many customer service representatives work 8-hour shifts with only two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute break for lunch. In addition, when not on a break, agents are expected to constantly take calls, answer customer questions, or take notes on customer conversations. Such a regime does not allow much time to decompress after an abusive call and thus can negatively impact an agent’s well-being and their likelihood of staying.
Given this and the expectation that abuse levels could rise in the coming months, leaders need to think carefully and possibly rethink how they organize and fund their contact centers if they are to care for, retain and get the best out of their people.
To protect their people from abusive customers. Organizations need to do more, in real time, to protect their employees from hostility and abusive customers. A contact center employee Sarah Skaggs interviewed for: an article in the US TODAY, would like abusive callers to pay a price for their bad behavior. In the article, she says, “I wish they’d shut people’s accounts down for being super rude to us,” a sentiment I don’t find very surprising.
If organizations do not respond in this or similar way, one could say that they implicitly excuse the abuse and say that it is just part of the job. This goes against company statements such as ‘our people are our most important capital’.
In general, organizations and leaders need to have clearer policies about what agents can do when faced with an abusive customer and how they will respond as a business.
If they don’t better train, equip, organize and protect their customer service staff, they will pay the price for higher staff turnover and lower service standards.
That’s not a situation anyone wants.
