Colin Stokes, MD of Adiuvo writes regarding verbal abuse of staff and what we can do to combat it.
We recently posted on LinkedIn about the difficulties our staff encounter dealing with angry customers; it was about one specific instance but we published alongside it multiple examples of recent similar abuse our team suffered whilst carrying out their duties.
Whilst we accept our experience is exacerbated by the nature of our service, it is contact centre based and we are being contacted by those who are or believe they are suffering from an emergency and that means the calls are heightened but even so we have noticed an uplift in these types of calls and the level of abuse, and apparently so do a lot of people in the industry according to the responses and comments we received with several property managers who agreed that it was all too common an occurrence both on calls and correspondence.
Reasons are not exactly clear but whether it’s a shift in perceived societal norms (and a result of too easily shared anonymous comments on social media?) or an increase in stressors that are apparent over the last few years is not totally clear but to put it in context we are currently finding that almost 1% of calls contain some form of abuse.
Presuming this will continue or even worsens what can we do to equip our teams and colleagues to help them deal with this?
We’ve been working with Think Wow, a specialist Customer Experience company to create training that enables our teams to understand where this level of intense emotion can come from when a caller becomes irate and empower them to empathise and de-escalate the situation. I’m sure every one of us has been in a situation where we could feel our frustration rising at some point, remembering that behind the anger is a human being just like us, who’s feeling stressed and under pressure can make it easier to find the empathy needed to resolve the call peacefully.
We’ve also ensured a strong focus throughout the training on protecting our employee’s mental wellbeing with sessions designed to help them notice when their own emotional safety has been at risk and provide them with some simple techniques they can use to help protect their long-term mental health.
In our industry there will be times when we aren’t able to deliver exactly what a caller might be asking for and learning to deliver that news with authority but just enough empathy that they know we’d help if we could is critical.
As our next phase of ensuring our employees have everything they need to protect them from aggressive calls we’ll also be looking to provide training on conflict resolution skills for managers.
Adiuvo (adiuvo.org.uk) are specialist Call Handlers for the Property Sector, managing over 700,000 properties out of hours. ThinkWow can be found at thinkwow.co.uk.
Colin Stokes, Managing Director, Adiuvo
