Most, if not all call center employees go through stress.  Some would say it’s nothing compared to other industries but I doubt that.  Advertising, publishing and broadcasting companies are stressful as well.  It is as fast paced as well.

Okay, I hear all of you.  Yes, it is stressful.  Why?  Depending on your work load and position, the level of stress is different.

1. Agent – outbound or inbound?

If you were calling up people, you would be stressed to get as many closed deals as possible within a time frame, usually an hour.  What makes it more difficult are the legal compliance scripts that the client expects you to read.  Usually, they turn customers off – goodbye sale!

If you were answering calls and part of an outsourced call center, you’d have to deal with many metrics and of course, the dreaded AHT (Average Handle Time).

2.  Team Leader / Manager

You juggle tasks everyday.  You need to handle a group of people with different personalities, make sure they come to work and on time, listen to their concerns, talk to screaming customers, type reports, monitor calls, coach them periodically, motivate, push them to their limits so that you can get a higher pay check since you met your metrics and the list goes on.

3. Quality Evaluator / Analyst

Everybody expects you to be the expert, the guru, the analyst, to find out what’s happening with each agent, team or the whole site,  to listen to calls day in and out, coach them on every call being monitored and score correctly, why are customers complaining and what makes them happy, and when a program is failing because of quality fingers point at you and the list goes on here too.

4.  Trainer

Teaching everybody in the site, get certified from the client, creating training modules if agents are not doing their jobs or they need to learn more and improve, have the same energy level class after class, expect everyone to be the subject matter expert and the list goes on as well.

5.  HR Personnel

Simply put, you have to hire a large number of quality people and put processes into place that will ensure we get great employees and of course put up with everybody’s complaints.

Bottom line: Customer’s demands are ever changing and each employee in the office should focus on making sure we make them happy most of the time.  It changes so fast, there is no time to relax and smell the flowers.

Photo courtesy of Nina’s Flickr Photostream