1. Ways To Prevent Customer
Service Team Burnout3
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We call them Customer Care Providers for one reason: they care. They care about
their customers, about their company and about doing a great job. If they don’t care
about these things, they are merely babysitting our office or retail space. But the good
ones, the ones who truly care are in constant danger of burnout, unless they can be
trained in a system or develop a method themselves for handling difficult customers,
and difficult situations. The three leading causes of burnout can cost you thousands in
lost sales, staff turnover, time and low morale.
Teach them to read the situation and read the customer
Much of customer service is intuitive. We have a ‘gut feel’ about what the right thing
to do is in any given situation. Intuition is developed over a long period of time from
experience and trial and error. Not everyone has experience or the ability to recognize
a repeat situation and benefit from prior knowledge. Many people continue to solve
problems with the same methodology that didn’t work last time. These are the individu-
als who would benefit from training in a step-by-step method to lower tension and take
customers through a process of solvability. It is a learned behavior in dozens profes-
sions – medicine, police work, air traffic controllers – and it is a skill that can be taught.
Learning to read people, understanding why they speak and behave the way they do is
the beginning of preserving your cool under fire.
Expand their communication skills
A good description of a customer service providers’ work is professional communicator.
It is the principle activity on a daily basis. The better communicator you are, the more
information you can gather and the better chance you have of helping the custom-
er solve their problem and make a good buying decision. So much depends on an
employees’ ability to control their words, tonality and body language when dealing with
a customer; being able to speak with them in a way that diffuses rather than triggers
emotion. To de-escalate a tense situation, the customer care provider must have the
communication skills to take their customer from emotional to rational and calm.
Encourage them not to take negativity personally
We marvel at those who can avoid getting ‘hooked in’ to a customers’ nasty com-
ments, glares and rants. Staying calm in these situations is challenging and it may
seem natural that a caring customer service provider take it personally. But feeling guilty,
or overly responsible, or even feeling bad about oneself won’t solve the customers’
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© 2015 Sandler Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. S Sandler Training Finding Power In Reinforcement (with design) is a registered service mark of Sandler Systems, Inc.
Sandler Training regularly trains customer service providers to help increase revenues. Through our program, Strategic Customer
Care, we lead participants through a communications and sales process that will help them create a sales “comfort level,” a “helping
approach” to sales, and a structured behavior plan that will enable sales to become part of their daily routine into the future.
problem. Customers may even take advantage of what they perceive as a weakness
and ask for more than is possible to give. Customers may try to make it personal by di-
recting personal slurs at the employee. If we do not arm our employees with a powerful
method to protect themselves from such employees, they may eventually succumb to
burnout and leave the position.
Invest in your frontline people with leadership, training and support
If the expectations of management are that customer service providers will handle every
difficult customer and situation to a win/win conclusion, there must be some training
and support involved. Having an established process to follow gives employees a tem-
plate and the confidence to ‘handle it’. Often frontline employees are reprimanded for
handling a situation poorly, yet not given an alternative method or even modelled behav-
ior to follow. Change starts from the top of an organization and before further stressing
employees, ensure they are trained in handling difficult situations.
The key to long term, strong customer care employees is ensuring they have the tech-
niques, attitudes and behaviors that protect them from burnout. As they say, there are
two ways to get to the top of an oak tree. You can climb it. Or you burying an acorn
and sit on it for 20 years. Which will get you the results you want – train your people to
protect themselves from difficult people or let them grow a thick skin by being battered
over and over again? The problem with the latter method is that you lose many good
people in the meantime and that is a costly issue.
At Sandler Training, we believe customer care providers are an integral part of the sales
team. They have the power to lose customers, but they also in a position to greatly
add to our top line revenues. Investing in customer care providers can lead to happier
customers, happier employees and more black ink.
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