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No matter your industry, call center burnout is an ever-present challenge, affecting both employees and businesses. The median annual attrition rate for customer service representatives typically falls between 30% and 45%, with higher rates in call centers and retail sectors.
Companies with strong employee engagement strategies can reduce attrition to below 20%. One way to increase call center retention is to tackle burnout as early as possible. Since call center agents are costly to recruit, hire and train — especially when you have large teams — the most cost-effective way to address this is still to retain agents whenever you can.
What Is Call Center Burnout?
Call center burnout is a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress in a call center environment. It’s often a result of heavy workloads and challenging customer interactions in disparate and siloed environments. Burnout can severely impact agents’ and reps’ well-being and productivity, leading to increased turnover rates — and ultimately, lower sales performance, conversion rates or service quality.
Burnout differs from fatigue, which typically refers to physical or mental tiredness resulting from temporary overexertion or lack of rest. Burnout, on the other hand, is a deeper, chronic state of exhaustion that affects someone’s ability to function effectively over the long term due to prolonged stress and dissatisfaction. While you can usually alleviate fatigue with extra rest, burnout requires a more comprehensive approach to address underlying causes and restore your employees’ well-being.
Burnout can affect anyone in a high-stress environment, such as call centers. Agents often face high call volumes and must sometimes manage angry or frustrated customers, which makes them more susceptible to burnout. Frontline customer service and sales workers, who frequently deal with demanding customers and the pressures of hitting quota, are especially at risk.
How Call Center Burnout Impacts a Business
Call center burnout isn’t just bad for your employee experience — it also impacts the business overall in a few ways:
Decreased Productivity
When someone is burned out, they often can’t handle tasks with the same speed or effectiveness that they’re normally able to, and agents are no different. Burned-out call center workers tend to be less engaged and efficient, impacting overall productivity. Burnout often results in more frequent sick leave and absenteeism, further disrupting operations.
Lower Customer Satisfaction
Burnout affects your customers too. Exhausted agents often struggle to provide high-quality service, decreasing customer satisfaction.
Damaged Company or Brand Reputation
The end result of all of these impacts, from high turnover to poor customer service, can all damage your brand. Because call center agents are typically in support roles, the most direct and immediate effects are usually seen in customer reviews about declining customer service or long wait times.
Causes of Call Center Burnout
Employees often cite feeling constantly on call, unfair treatment, unreasonable workloads, low autonomy, and lack of social support as job aspects that negatively impact their mental health and well-being.
Other specifics in the call center environment can contribute to burnout include:
High Call Volumes
Continuously high call volumes are one major factor that can overwhelm your employees and lead to burnout. This impacts agents on both the customer service and sales sides—larger companies can receive hundreds or even thousands of customer support inquiries every day, while sales reps on teams with aggressive call targets might have to make the same number of calls daily.
Digital Overload
With access to more data than ever, sales leaders sometimes find it tempting to bombard agents with an overwhelming amount of information.
While some information is definitely useful, too much too fast can lead to cognitive fatigue and stress. If your call center agents also have to constantly shift focus between multiple systems to access that information or perform different tasks, this can also make it difficult for them to stay organized and do their jobs.
Ideally, call center teams should have a streamlined tech stack that helps agents do everything they need to in a single platform to reduce app fatigue.
Outdated Technology
The tools your call center agents use can also contribute to burnout by hindering their ability to do their jobs efficiently.
You can help your agents by equipping them with up-to-date tools and systems. For example, can you provide real-time coaching to help agents quickly answer tough questions from customers? (AI-powered platforms like Dialpad have features designed to help support agents and sales reps with this — we use Dialpad Sell features to automate this kind of live coaching for our sellers.)
Common Call Center Burnout Symptoms
With so many contact centers operating remotely, it’s getting harder for managers to spot when their agents or reps are struggling. Here’s some red flags to watch for:
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Exhaustion and Work Avoidance
Usually, this manifests as decreased productivity, increased call avoidance and absenteeism, and more frequent requests for time off. On a day-to-day basis, you should also look for signs of disengagement during virtual meetings (like a lack of participation or responsiveness).
Regular one-on-one check-ins and surveys give you a chance to observe any subtle changes in behavior, address issues early and provide support before burnout becomes too severe.
Deteriorating Performance
Often, simply tracking metrics such as call center occupancy, call resolution rates, average handling times or customer complaints will be enough to tip managers off if agents are starting to get burned out.
Elevated Turnover Rates
It’s relatively easy to notice trends in turnover rates by analyzing HR metrics. Work with your HR team to pull data on things like the frequency of resignations, as well as trends in employee tenure and recruitment costs. This will give you insights into underlying causes and patterns that might be contributing to higher turnover rates.
Preventing Call Center Burnout
It’s always more advantageous to get ahead of call center burnout. Here are some best practices that can help:
Implement Flexible Scheduling
Flexible shifts and remote work options give your agents more control and reduce stress. Effective workforce management solutions can take this further by optimizing schedules based on call volume forecasts, ensuring the right number of agents are on hand without overloading the team. Tools like Dialpad WFM enable real-time tracking and allow you to dynamically adjust staffing levels to handle unexpected spikes in call volumes, keeping stress manageable for your agents.
Provide Adequate Training
Equip your call center agents with the skills, training and resources they need to handle customer interactions effectively. This includes a detailed onboarding program, an online Help Center for agents and ongoing updates to training whenever possible.
Dialpad's tools, like the Ai Assistant and Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards, provide invaluable support by delivering helpful information during calls and streamlining onboarding with consistent, accessible guidance — empowering agents to perform confidently while saving at least two hours per onboarding session.
Set Realistic Goals
Make sure your call center’s performance targets are tough but achievable. Otherwise, they not only skew the perception of agents’ performance during review cycles but also negatively impact morale. Agents always feel under pressure because they think they’re underperforming.
Recognize and Reward Efforts
Whether it’s a dashboard that fosters some friendly competition or quarterly bonuses, make sure your team has some way of acknowledging and rewarding your call center agents’ hard work. It’ll boost morale — and motivation.
Promote Team Building
Most teams have off-sites and regular social hangouts, in person or remotely. Your call center team should have the chance to do the same. Try to organize team-building activities at least once a quarter to strengthen team relationships and improve job satisfaction.
Management’s Role in Preventing Call Center Burnout
Contact center management teams and leaders play a crucial role in preventing call center burnout. They must create a supportive work environment, set realistic expectations, and provide adequate resources and training.
They are also responsible for implementing strategies to reduce stress and recognizing when employees need a break. Not all agents can recognize early call center burnout signs, and managers who have led call center teams for a long time are more skilled at noticing symptoms before their teams get burned out.
Using Technology to Combat Burnout
The tools you give your agents are an important piece of tackling burnout.
Ai-powered support
Ai chatbots like Dialpad’s Ai Agent, can handle routine inquiries and answer simple questions 24/7, reducing wait times for customers and agent workloads so they can focus their attention on more complex needs.
For calls routed to agents, an Ai Assistant can offer real-time support while the agent is on the call. Generative Ai serves as an incredible tool, effortlessly delivering clear information for agents while they engage with customers. It also creates automatic post-call summaries, neatly outlining action items to enhance productivity and communication.
Performance Analytics
When agents join your call center, they have unique coaching needs and different levels of experience. It's important to monitor their performance, identify areas for improvement, and provide regular support. In the past, managers would listen to a small portion of calls and evaluate agents using scorecards. Unfortunately, this resulted in only 2 to 3% of calls being reviewed on average, leaving agents with minimal feedback and limited opportunities for growth.
Modern scorecards leverage Ai technology to automatically score up to 100% of calls, providing a continuous flow of feedback to agents. With more feedback available, agents can improve their skills and overall performance, which enhances their well-being.
Increased Communication
Communication typically flies under the radar, but we’ve found that making it easy for agents (especially on distributed teams) to ask their teammates or managers questions via a messaging tool helps reduce burnout.
Your tools should also communicate with each other. For example, your sales or support team’s CRM system should integrate with your core communication tools to streamline information sharing and reduce manual data entry. This alleviates repetitive work and allows your agents to focus on higher-value and impactful tasks.
Call center burnout affects employees and businesses in almost every industry, but can be managed and prevented with the right strategies. By understanding the causes, symptoms and impacts of burnout, and implementing the right solutions, you can improve your agents’ well-being and improve productivity while creating a more positive work environment.
Learn how call center teams use Dialpad Support, a completed contact center solution to empower both agents and managers to do their work more effectively at dialpad.com.
