This white paper explores the impact of noncommunicable diseases on the call center employee and what can be done to mitigate some of the risks.

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(972) 680-0800 | www.lymba.com
Customer Service and Non-Communicable Diseases: What Every Call Center Employee Should Know

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A CUSTOMER SERVICE EPIDEMIC
It has long been known that working in call centers is stressful, and stress is a driver for risk factors such as consumption of alcohol and elicit drugs, poor nutrition, lack of sleep and other deficiencies that can promote early onset of these types of disease.
According to a statement made in 2012 by Dr. Anthony Leachon consulting for the Department of Health, approximately 60% of Fillipino BPO workers had developed non-communicable diseases such as stroke, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.i
“Call centre workers are exposed to high amounts of sensory bombardment from the office environment – lighted call-boards showing queued calls, ringing phones and computer screens. Their DNA and brain circuits have an over- intake of sensory information,” says Annemarie Lombard, CEO of Sensory Intelligence Consulting.ii
Stress sets off an alarm in the brain, which responds by preparing the body for defensive action. The nervous system is aroused and hormones are released to sharpen the senses, quicken the pulse, deepen respiration, and tense the muscles. This response (sometimes called the fight or flight response) is important because it helps us defend against threatening situations. The response is preprogrammed biologically. Everyone responds in much the same way, regardless of whether the stressful situation is at work or home.iii
One of the less visible signs of the toll of stress on contact center employees is the stark contrast between their 27 day per year industry average for health related absenteeism and the U.S. average across all industries of 8.5 days.
British call center union UNISON polled their 1.4M workers in 2010 and found that 87% complain about work related stress as a major problem for which their bosses provide no relief.
A 2011 Psychology Today study of call center workers revealed that some CSRs averaged up to 10 hostile encounters per day with customers.
“I’m cursed at, called stupid, slow, moron, retard and idiot so many times a day that I cry myself to sleep most nights."
-anonymous quote from study participantiv

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In a more targeted survey of 3,000 call center employees, UNISON found that 68% of respondents felt that they were stressed by unrealistic performance targets, 66% felt stressed by poor management, and 53% felt bullied and harassed. In Canada, research by the Shepell-fgi Research Group revealed that in a survey of 100 call center employees, 1 in 10 employees experienced major depression and 1 in 100 was considered at risk of suicide.
v
A French survey of 2,130 call center workers conducted in 2008 found that 47% of respondents reported experiencing vocal fatigue, while 39.4% experienced psychological distress and almost 24% had used psychoactive medication during the previous twelve months.vi
Researchers have defined specific pressure points that contribute to contact center stress:
- Role conflict – the pressure of conflicting directives to improve operational efficiency while simultaneously maximizing quality of service.
- Inconsistencies between performance expectations and evaluations
- Role Ambiguity – lack of clarity and guidance to meet expectations
- Lack of adequate resources – training, technology, knowledge
- Excessive monitoring
- Lack of control
- Monotony
- Lack of recognition
- Inflexible working hours
- Unfairness – in distribution of workload, pay, etc.
- Angry customers
- Questionable job security or career path
- Physical demands
So What Can Be Done To Improve Occupational Safety & Health of Contact Center Employees?
Adoption of Non-Voice Channels of Communication
Non-voice channels of communication are becoming increasingly validated by consumers as a desirable alternative to telephone customer service because it allows an asynchronous exchange of information between the customer and the CSR, eliminating the stress and irritation extended hold times add to the customers’ initial frustration for which they are seeking help.
Less stress for the customer equals less stress transferred to the CSR attempting to resolve a problem.

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Provision of Adequate Knowledge Resources
Having fast access to appropriate answers to incoming questions can easily lighten the mental burden of the CSR by saving time and making him or her sound more intelligent for the customer. Every minute that a CSR spends searching for an answer is a minute that other customers in need are kept waiting, so identifying and filling in knowledge gaps with the information your employees need can help to break the frustration cycle.
Automation of Monotonous Tasks
Decrease the boredom and increase the care by outsourcing the repetitive and menial tasks to artificially intelligent technologies such as IVR capture of account holder data populating to the CSR’s computer screen so that the CSR can skip straight to addressing the problem when answering a call instead of increasing customer frustration by stopping to collect such data before listening to the problem at hand.
Lymba’s PowerAgent software as a service can take monotonous email and web-based requests for password resets and other common problems and use natural language processing to understand inbound requests by context and match them to articles in your Knowledge Base to automate email answers to customers for simpler questions, while passing on more complex requests to your CSRs along with suggestions for possible answers.
Fair Distribution of Emotional Labor
Maintaining the polite and professional manner when dealing with irate or unreasonable customers has been defined by psychologists as Emotional Labor. For most CSRs, the in-bound requests they receive are seldom positive, and therefore, most feedback from the moment they pick up a call or open a case tends to skew neutral or negative.
PowerAgent has the ability to pre-screen text based requests and flag them as negative or neutral, which can then aid contact center managers and CSRs in ensuring fair and appropriate distribution of cases to give employees a greater sense of equality and provide relief to those who need it by allowing them to focus on neutral cases to have an “emotional break” before resuming handling more difficult cases. This gives both CSRs and managers an element of control over the pacing and emotional fatigue as they move through their queue.
i InterAksyon: Call Center Agents’ Health in Near Crisis. Published 21.2.2012. http://www.interaksyon.com/business/25067/call-center-agents-health-in-near-crisis---doh (Accessed 10.9.2014)
ii Health24: What It’s Really Like to Work in a Call Center. Published 23.1.2014. http://www.health24.com/Lifestyle/Healthy-workplace/Work-and-stress/Call-centre-blues-20120721 (Accessed 12.9.2014)

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iii NIOSH. © 1999. National Occupational Safety and Health: Stress. . . At Work. Job Stress and Health. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/99-101/ (Accessed 12.9.2014)
iv Filwood, David. Minimizing Call Center Burnout/Emotional Exhaustion: 3 Management Tips. Published 19.6.2014. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140619041423-3995896-minimizing-call-center-burnout- emotional-exhaustion-3-management-tips (Accessed 9.9.2014)
v Shepell-fgi Research © 2008. Employee Health & Wellbeing: Trends in the Call Center Sector. 2008 series, Volume 1, Issue 2.
vi Charbotel, et al. ©Springer 2008. Working conditions in call-centers, the impact on employee
health: a transversal study. Part II. http://www.gwlcentreformentalhealth.ca/pdf/Call_Centre_Workers_Interna_Jour_of_Occ_and_Envior_Health_Resource.pdf (Accessed 9.9.2014)