Agent Burnout, ChatGPT/GPT4 Anxiety, and What if it’s your fault?
Don’t worry, this isn’t a collection of “and other stories.” Let’s start with agent burnout.
I’m grateful to Christopher Elliott at Forbes.com for including me in his recent piece on agent burnout. If you haven’t seen it, you can find it here.
It’s real, it’s everywhere, and it’s not just because of the labor shortage, quiet quitting, and technology. It’s also because of things leaders and managers do or don’t do with their teams. Sometimes with the best of intentions, we put in too many metrics, we skimp on agent-enabling technology, we skip over the cultural nuances that make an organization a great place. Call shedding and self-service means that the hardest calls are the ones that still come to people.
There are some things you can do to reduce overwork and stress
Make sure agent occupancy is at a reasonable level – overwork is a direct feature of burnout. Too many calls without a break results in sub-optimizing everything for agents and customers.
- Keep the metrics simple and balanced. Oftentimes speed of answer balanced with accuracy are the two most critical things that an agent can control and that drive customer satisfaction with the interaction.
- Apply technology in the service of people – "by people, for people" to drive a great experience. This can be a variety of things from training that emphasizes learning and retention, decision support, and the use of agent-assist chatbots to help agents provide great service.
- Pursue your initiatives in manageable chunks. Large scale change requires planning, and yet you can make incremental changes while pursuing the big picture. Don’t wait on the factors that are driving agent burnout and anxiety if you can make progress today.
Which takes us to the hot topic that replaced quiet quitting: generative AI, most well known as embodied in ChatGPT and its new sibling, GPT4.
While generative AI may cause anxiety, it can also amaze in its creativity and ability to allow people to use their brain power in new and different ways.
My favorite ChatGPT example so far has been the New York Times valentine. I hope you saw it. The feature let you pick what kind of valentine you wanted to send – bitter, romantic, platonic, over the top, or wistful. Then you chose the recipient with a long list of addressees like your partner, plant, therapist, senator, Rihanna, and more.
The outputs were fabulous and fun... and thought provoking. How could it be so funny, so insightful, so emotional, so dead-on with Taylor Swift’s style?
But it was only a matter of time until a poorly trained chatbot said something inappropriate. A number of journalists and others have already figured out some of the limitations of the technology through interactions with ChatGPT and GPT 4.
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic put some great perspective on what the technology can really do. He writes:
“So what are we to make of this minor genius and content-spewing nuisance? The combination of possibilities makes predictions impossible. Imagine somebody showing you a picture of a tadpole-like embryo at 10 days, telling you the organism was growing exponentially, and asking you to predict the species… you have no way of knowing. All you know is this thing is larval and it might become anything.”
Anxiety has already rippled through customer service multiple times. It happened when chatbots were first introduced years ago and happens every time they get better.
Generative AI is remarkable because it’s no longer essentially doing a search for every request. It has been trained and responds instantly.
Can it give you the creeps? Yes.
Can it also be amazing? Yes!
The opportunities to put some boundaries on the data and information open tantalizing possibilities for supporting human agents interacting with customers – researching hard questions, instant instructions for system inputs, ideas for things to say in difficult situations, the next best decision in a specific – not a general – scenario.
While we can all worry about where we are going to get burned by this, there’s just as much power in where we will get to excel as a result. For customer experience and customer service, this is incredibly liberating. There is something to love here (with qualifiers and an understanding of risk).
What if you could abandon some of the gory process work and really think about the customer experience?
What if getting the right information at the right time didn’t require hundreds of hours of knowledge base updates?
What if you could standardize core information while tailoring the tone – like the New York Times valentines – without having to create it all from scratch?
What if you could focus on editing to the end result to get to the answer?
What if it’s not your fault and you did lower your team’s stress?
The possibilities are enormous.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
______________
I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.