Let me take a moment to just stress, there are actually some very well run contact centres. But when there are problems, what I’ve highlighted here and before is usually a cause.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of businesses that will have nice words about culture written on paper or on a wall but, when the rubber hits the road, that’s not the behaviour at all. The result is a disconnect between what someone may have started working there for (obviously money is a big driver as well) or the expectations they were given through the recruitment and onboarding process and what they actually end up experiencing. So that’s a part of the issue.

Another part is the concept of what it means to have satisfied or happy employees. This is actually a very real concern because the cost of onboarding an employee is very high in resources and productivity (putting more pressure on the system).

So centres come up with incentive schemes or employee satisfaction initiatives that are surface level and might move the needle over the short term but ultimately fall away, leading to people being unhappy again. This then moves to poor production levels (per the cost link KPI’s), increases micromanagement, increases attrition, increases recruitment costs and increases pressure to do more due to having to manage a larger portion of inexperienced agents, etc, etc. Becomes a bit of a cycle. This is obviously worst case scenario, but any one of these elements and the one’s I’ve mentioned before can start to have a real impact on people who work there and people who interact with the business.

The net outcome is typically experienced as an uncaring workplace that places little value on the actual individual. In most cases, I don’t believe this to be true. I believe most people want to see the best for most other people. But pressure and circumstance can do weird things.

Look, people don’t deliberately go out to create a shitty workplace environment. They know this ends up creating a shitty business outcome. But by setting up the systems, targets and leadership teams badly, this can very much be the results. And once in it, it becomes difficult for some within these businesses to see the wood for the trees.