Customer-induced stress in call centre work: A comparison of audio- and videoconference

Abstract

Call centre work was simulated in an experiment with 96 experienced call centre agents. The experimental design comprised two factors. First, agents communicated with customers either via phone, pc‐videoconference or pc‐videoconference with additional instructions increasing time pressure. The second experimental factor varied customer behaviour: half of the customers were friendly whereas the other half were rude. Several indicators of strain (e.g. emotional dissonance, tiredness) were assessed by self‐reports. Moreover, the levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA) in salvia were determined at three sampling points and specific behaviours of agents (e.g. smiling to customers) were assessed using video data. It was found that unfriendly customer behaviour led to more strain and lower call performance than friendly customer behaviour. Inducing time pressure increased IgA‐levels and reduced talking‐time with customers. However, contrary to the expectations, the availability of video data did not enhance strain of agents. Instead, it was found that videoconferencing increased activation of agents if customers were friendly. Since higher levels of activation can counteract boredom and because customers often prefer to see their service providers, adding videoconference facilities in call centres seem to be a fruitful way of enriching routine call centre work.

Customer Mistreatment: A Review of Conceptualizations and a Multilevel Theoretical Model

“…Anxiety has also been linked with customer mistreatment because customer mistreatment creates ambiguity about how employee performance and well-being will be affected (Wegge, Van Dick, & Von Bernstorff, 2010;Zhan, Wang, & Shi, 2013). Furthermore, an array of other negative emotions, including sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, hurt, guilt, and shame Rupp et al, 2007;Volmer, Binnewies, Sonnentag, & Niessen, 2012;Wegge, Vogt, & Wecking, 2007;Yang & Diefendorff, 2009) have also been examined as affective consequences of customer mistreatment.…”

“…Thus, service employees experiencing greater job demands are less likely to deliver high-quality service (van Jaarsveld et al, 2010). For instance, Wegge et al (2007) observed that service employees under greater time pressure experienced more strain and spent less time talking to customers.…”

“…In particular, Dormann and Zapf (2004) categorized customer mistreatment as a social stressor because it may threaten service employees' self-efficacy, goal success, and resources (see also Penney & Spector, 2005). For example, Wegge et al (2007) manipulated customer behavior toward call center employees and showed that employees serving unfriendly (vs. friendly) customers reported higher levels of psychological strain.…”

Problematic customers and customer service employee retaliation

“…These employees generally must suppress inner feelings of anger, respond with a smile and fulfill customer needs even without the desire to do so. Organizations usually monitor employees to ensure they do not respond in retaliatory or unhappy ways (Wegge et al, 2007) and insist that they fake emotions during difficult customer encounters. If employees feel irritated, mad or a desire to walk away, but must respond with a "smile" or pleasant tone, such job-related behaviors cause emotional dissonance (Wegge et al, 2007).…”

Assessing and improving health in the workplace: an integration of subjective and objective measures with the STress Assessment and Research Toolkit (St.A.R.T.) method

“…Several researchers underlined that customer management has not been investigated enough as a source of stress in the literature of work-related stress, although 22% of negative events reported by workers occurred when dealing with ‘problem customers’ and some anger-provoking events related to mistreatment by customers [16,17]. …”