By J. N. Halm
Customer-facing employees go through a lot at the frontline. This is a fact that anyone who has spent a few days dealing with customers will accept without debate. Dealing with people of different backgrounds with different outlooks on life can be so emotionally draining.
When one adds the fact that these customers come in with different emotions and it is expected of the frontline employee to moderate his or her emotions to handle all these different customers, the job of the customer service employee becomes a lot more daunting.
It is one thing for customers to come into the interactions with different emotions. If customers kept their emotions to themselves, it would be a bit more manageable for the individual who has to deal with these customers. The truth is that very few customers keep their emotions to themselves.
The majority express their emotions, especially when things are not going as expected. I believe this is to ensure that the employee is left with no ambiguity as to how the customer is feeling about that particular situation. As human as frontline employees are, it is not farfetched to see how customers’ expressed emotions affect these employees.
One area in which employee performance becomes affected by customer emotions is employee effort. When customer service employees become overwhelmed, it affects the efforts they put into their roles. It is almost impossible to give off one’s best for a customer when the one is not in the best of moods. The individual might try to do his or her best, but it will not be the best the one is truly capable of.
It has also been found that when the unpleasant emotions customers express get the better of a customer service agent, it tends to affect the one’s accuracy on the job. It is easy for customer-handling employees to make mistakes when they are not in the best emotional state. The pressure from the negativity tends to cloud the employee’s sense of judgment.
Fatigue is another of the symptoms of an overwhelmed customer service employee. Stress can be very draining, emotionally but also physically. Fatigue is one of the first symptoms of emotional exhaustion. Even the most upbeat customer service employee will go home tired after hours and hours of being berated by irritable customers.
With all of these negatives, it is therefore little wonder that studies have found that when customer service employees feel overwhelmed with the negative emotions associated with serving customers, it even affects the civility of the employee.
On many occasions customer-handling employees have acted in ways that are not in their character. The pressure and the emotional overload can cause the mildest and most well-mannered individuals to act in ways that surprise all. This can be very unfortunate.
Of all the areas that are affected by the negative emotions of customers, one area that many businesses have to manage, and manage well, is the effect of customers’ expressed emotions on the speed of the employee’s delivery.
It is a fact that we live in an age when the need for speed is real. Today’s customer is very impatient. Responsiveness or the ability to serve customers promptly is so important that failure to deliver in this parameter can mean the difference between losing a customer and gaining one for life.
A study published in the August 2020 edition of the Manufacturing & Service Operations Management journal brought out some interesting findings on the subject matter. The title of the said article was “Do Customer Emotions Affect Agent Speed? An Empirical Study of Emotional Load in Online Customer Contact Centers”. The researchers defined emotional load as “the amount of customer emotion that a service agent encounters and must handle.” Emotional load is therefore the additional load a frontline employee has to contend with besides the workload.
To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers analysed more than 140,000 customer-agent conversations from the archives of a large transportation company. The measure of the effect of the emotional load on customer service agents was the speed with which agents handled a particular customer’s request. They referred to this as Response Time (RT).
The study found that when customers expressed negative emotions towards customer-handling employees, there was an increase in the response time of the agent. In other words, it took longer for customer service employees to respond to the requests of angry customers.
This finding is actually in line with some earlier studies that predicted that negative customer emotions such as those of an angry customer had the potential to negatively affect the cognitive abilities of customer service employees.
Having served for years as a frontline employee, I can say with authority that this is so true. Angry customer outbursts can truly affect your ability to think properly. When that happens, it leads to a decrease in the speed with which you can serve the said angry customer.
I have witnessed colleagues who become so confused that they even literally lose their bearings. You see these individuals struggle to find documents or forms that are lying right in front of them. They struggle to even find information that is staring them on the computer screens. All these add to the delay in the response time of the employee, further aggravating the situation.
The study found that, for instance, when responding to angry customers via text messages, the length of the text was longer when dealing with angry customers than it was when dealing with positive customers. This makes sense since, in the case of the angry customer, it is expected that the agent explains issues a little bit more. Keeping the explanation brief without going into more details can make the case worse, so there might be cause to be a bit more explanatory.
The researchers also found that “a one-point increase in negative customer emotion increases agent RT by 19.7%.” This is to say that as customers become angrier, the effect it has on the response of customer service agents is exponential. A little anger from a customer has far-reaching consequences on the customer service employee.
Thankfully, there is a reverse effect of this phenomenon. In other words, increasing the response time tends to bring down a customer’s anger. When dealing with an angry customer, it was found that the quicker the response time of the customer service agent, the faster the customer’s anger dissipates. This might be because when the customer sees the agent put in effort to offer service responsively, it causes to customer to calm down.
Another interesting finding of this particular study is that the reduction in response time due to emotional load was greater than the reduction in response time caused by a longer-than-normal queue or even delays caused by an agent involved in multitasking. This finding, for me, was most intriguing. In other words, the emotions of the angry customer are worse on customer service employees than even the workload itself. This is proof of the power of emotions at the frontline.
Indeed, customer service is essentially a study in Emotions Management. Customer service is about frontline employees managing their emotions as they deal with the emotions of those they are dealing with. The best customer service employees are those who are or become adept at managing three types of emotions—the employee’s own emotions, the customer’s emotions and those emotions the customer expresses.
This is why experts advise that those who deal with customers regularly are given adequate training on managing emotions. Those who manage customers must also have a way to regularly release the emotional loads that they carry day after day.
From the ongoing discourse, one can appreciate the importance of managing emotions when it comes to dealing with customers. Businesses must acknowledge this and therefore ensure that when they are staffing the frontline, they do so with individuals with emotional intelligence.
Customer service agents must be individuals who can deal with negative customer emotions without being affected by them. Customer-handling employees need to be so trained on the job that they do their jobs with speed but with accuracy as well. It is however equally important that the workload on the agent is managed well because when emotional load adds to a heavy workload, even the most efficient employee will end up becoming overloaded.
