High ticket loads due to rapid scaling

Scaling is essential for every business. 

However, it becomes problematic when your team size and resources remain the same. Imagine managing over a thousand queries, up from a few dozen per day, with just five agents. That means each agent has to handle about 200 tickets every day, compared to the previous 20.

This increases the workload and pressure on your team, even if the salary is appropriate. Your agents exhaust themselves to meet a set target, which leads to burnout in the long run. 

‍

Handling repetitive tasks

Customer service may seem routine, but the daily tasks can quickly become overwhelming:

• Responding to routinely asked questions
• Processing refunds
• Escalating complaints to a higher level
• Manually updating customer details
• Retrieving customer data
• Managing order status inquiries

First, these repetitive tasks gulp 10% to 25% of your agent’s productive time. Moreover, constantly handling the same inquiries without variety or meaningful engagement makes the job feel monotonous and mentally exhausting. 

Over time, this lack of stimulation can reduce motivation, increase stress levels, lead to burnout, and eventually impact the quality of customer interactions.

Inadequate technical support and training

Untrained or improperly trained agents struggle to handle customer queries effectively, leading to frustration, stress, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. 

When agents feel overwhelmed, their performance suffers, creating a ripple effect: customers become frustrated due to poor service, and overall satisfaction declines. 

Agents, already struggling to keep up, may face backlash from both frustrated customers and unsympathetic management. Over time, this cycle of stress, blame, and dissatisfaction erodes morale and also causes burnout.

At the same time, inadequate or outdated support tools and AI-powered technical solutions mean your agents have to execute most tasks manually. This results in human errors, repetitive tasks that become monotonous, and inefficiency in delivery.

Toxic work culture and environment

Work culture becomes toxic when unrealistic expectations, a lack of recognition and appreciation for milestones met, illegal demands for overtime, unhealthy cutthroat competition fostered by the company, and poor team communication lead to disputes.

These reasons also contribute to a toxic work environment and workplace tension, which inevitably causes burnout.

Decreased productivity and morale

Burnout keeps your employees from their best, with many of them spending more time on a task than usual or getting stuck in a cycle of customers’ frustrated complaints. 

This is even more prevalent in younger employees, according to meQ. Under-30 employees are 62% more likely to report stress-impaired productivity than older employees older than 60.

When a significant number of your first-line support staff members break down under stress, others who are not affected by burnout have to step in to handle deficits. They eventually become overwhelmed as well, and the cycle continues until the whole team’s productivity and work morale take a significant dip.

Increased staff turnover

Chronic stress results in increased sick leave and absenteeism from work. But it can trigger worse outcomes—staff turnover. 

In a study conducted by UKG, one-third of affected GenZ employees may resign. Agents in the millennial age group are also likely to opt in for stability over continuous work strain on their mental health, and this often means quitting.

Increased staff turnover creates a void in your support team’s structure, leading to heavier workloads for the remaining agents and declining service quality. As experienced employees leave, valuable knowledge and expertise are lost, forcing your HR team to train new hires who may struggle to keep up constantly.

Customer dissatisfaction

A highly stressed customer service team and burnout support reps will provide subpar support. This can take the form of delayed response times, unsatisfactory resolutions, or aggressive communications between your service rep and a customer, resulting in poor service delivery and a bad customer experience.

65% of customers switch to another brand after a bad experience, so burnout ultimately increases your customer turnover rate.

Declining organizational ROI

High staff and customer turnover, recurring training and onboarding costs, and increased customer acquisition costs increase avoidable expenses. A recent Gallup analysis also shows that absenteeism can cost businesses $340 per employee per missed workday.

But besides the expenses, every customer lost as a result of agent burnout means lost revenue. Customers with bad experiences also write bad reviews that can damage your reputation and prevent other prospects from patronizing your business. 

Avoiding this is crucial, given that four in ten consumers use online reviews as their main channel of finding a product or even buying.

‍

1. Recognize the warning signs and causes 

Burnout often goes unnoticed at workplaces, and your agents might not bother talking about it because they don’t want to risk their jobs. So, it’s crucial to recognize the subtle signs, such as decreased productivity, routine mistakes, exhaustion, disengagement, and a lack of motivation.

Frequent clashes with other support reps or customers are also a pointer. Instead of being critical, step in to understand why and implement measures to address them, including providing time off if necessary.

2. Create a feedback chain between the team and organization leaders

Design a system that allows your agents to report factors that predispose to burnout like excess ticket allocations or unrealistic performance expectations. This could be a monthly survey, digital feedback integrated with every employee’s dashboard, and traditional office boxes. 

The feedback should also be optionally anonymous to avoid job threats from indicted employees, including team leads and managers. Review each entry carefully and respond to your support team. You can also host bi-monthly review sessions or open spaces to collect live feedback and make your agents feel heard.

3. Establish a healthy working environment and culture

Identify factors such as unrealistic expectations, lack of recognition and appreciation for milestones met, illegal demands for overtime, unhealthy cut-throat competitions, and eliminate them. 

Create a gamified reward system which recognizes and appreciates your agents for every milestone crossed. For instance, if an agent resolves ten complex queries on a streak without any callbacks from customers on the same issue, that deserves a shoutout or a monetized reward. 

Address overtime and moderate expectations—your agents are humans, not bots. Also, build a healthy culture by introducing engaging off-work activities such as team outings, wellness programs, casual game nights, and mindfulness sessions. 45% of employees say vacations work for them. 

Engaged employees are 71% less likely to experience burnout.

4. Moderate workload per agent as much as possible

Scale your customer support team according to your business needs. The more customers you onboard, the more queries you will receive and the more hands you will need to handle them. 

Most importantly, recognize that each agent has a different capacity for handling complaints—so avoid setting a fixed, one-size-fits-all quota. A better approach is to assess each agent’s past productivity based on their previous performance data. Use this information to assign workloads more effectively, ensuring that agents are neither overwhelmed nor underutilized.  

1. Integrate Chatbots to handle routine requests

AI-powered chatbots can manage routine L1 tasks such as processing order status inquiries, resetting passwords, answering recurring questions, handling basic troubleshooting, updating account details, and guiding customers through simple self-service options. 

This prevents ticket overload and helps your agents focus on managing a few complex requests that bots cannot handle.

As an omnichannel customer service platform with several AI-powered features, Plivo CX offers an OpenAI-powered self-service chatbot. It is designed to take the pressure off your team, escalate difficult queries to agents, and reduce time to resolution.

‍

2. Use a routing system to assign tickets to appropriate agents

AI-driven routing systems intelligently assign tickets to the right agents by analyzing customer data, agent availability, performance metrics, and the complexity of the query. This helps to reduce burnout by ensuring that workloads are distributed fairly and preventing individual agents from being overwhelmed with difficult or excessive tasks.

Plivo CX offers a powerful automation workflow builder to help you design skill-based routing pathways, which ensures tickets are routed to appropriate agents, in addition. Plivo CX’s in-app customer service solution utilizes customer data to allocate live chats to your support team members.

‍

3. Employ GenAI to assist agents

There are moments when you’re stuck and unsure of how to respond to a customer, particularly during peak hours when there’s an influx of customer queries. 

Generative AI leverages existing data to curate a relevant reply, which your agents can modify if necessary and send right away. By reducing response time and cognitive load, GenAI thus minimizes stress, prevents decision fatigue, and helps agents stay focused—ultimately reducing burnout.

You can use solutions like Plivo CX’s in-app customer service, which equips your agents with the best snippets to use every time and enables them to give quicker, more accurate responses.

‍