Violence against frontline workers and agents growing: Modern approaches required to protect employee wellbeing.

Violence against frontline workers has prompted a supermarket chain to consider using AI to battle the increase of crime in its stores and make the workplace safer for customer facing frontline staff.

Foodstuffs, a supermarket chain is considering using AI to tackle spike in retail crime. It comes after Foodstuffs released new statistics showing there have been 3900 incidents in its North Island stores from May to July this year: a 59 percent increase year-on-year and up almost 19 percent on the last quarter.?Foodstuffs considering using AI to tackle spike in retail crime, say parents don't want kids working in supermarkets | Newshub

CEO Chris Quin has come out publicly in support of his staff and his business to raise awareness and also protect an important right for any worker, that no harm should befall them during the course of carrying out their work-related duties. It is a fundamental right.

Significant growth in agent abuse impacting wellbeing and organisational productivity

A statistic that did not make headlines unfortunately is the massive volume and growth of the ‘unseen’ abuse of contact centre workers by customers and can be attested to by nearly every contact centre manager across the world.

In May to June quarter of ’23, in the 10 New Zealand contact centres that we tracked, abusive and angry customer interactions averaged 1% - 3.5% or 1,500 to 7,500, up 52% for same period L.Y.

Interactions tracked customers being verbally abusive to customer service agents including death threats and the use of racial slurs. Increasing levels of customer abusiveness is not just confined to New Zealand but is a global issue as our data from the Snapshotz contact centre audit and benchmarking app indicate.

There are several reasons why customers are abusive or angry. Paying attention to these reasons and taking appropriate action, will reduce the high emotional toll on individuals as psychological scars are hard to detect and cause enduring damage to both the individual and their families as well as a loss of morale, organisational productivity and customer satisfaction.

Many organisations have traditionally dealt with customer abuse by training of frontline staff on how to handle ‘difficult customers'. Today, a combination of traditional and modern approaches is required. AI aided technologies, analytics, process, product, service reviews and modern management approaches need to be applied. The need for change from traditional approaches is the added complexity of home work (hybrid) environments along with economic pressures faced by customers and changing expectations.

Customer Services Audit has been tracking health and safety and mental health and safety in contact centres since 2009 and through our deep knowledge of this area, we have developed a range of approaches for management to identify, combat and manage angry and abusive customers including traditional methods of training agents to ‘manage complaints’ and ‘difficult’ customers.

Offer for Customer Service Week ‘23.

As this is customer service week, we would like to share a master class from the Snapshotz professional development programme, specifically designed to assist organisations understand and respond with internal tools, technologies and skills to aid agent wellbeing including your customers.

Strategies to prevent abuse and improve mental health of frontline staff?

?There are 3 master classes delivered by experts in the industry and conducted online in the month of October. Open for 25 places per session of 3-hour duration. Usually, charged out at $575.00, these master classes are capped at $300.00 per attendee for the customer service week.

Check out details and benefits your team and organisation will gain and feedback from recent attendees.

*?????? ‘A fresh and holistic approach to combat an age old issue’ - Retail channel head (Bank)

*?????? ‘Immediately applicable’ - Head of operations (global insurer)

*?????? ‘We thought providing training for frontline agents was sufficient until we understood the impact of emotional labour combined with stressful and psychologically harmful customer interactions. Its certainly changed we manage and support frontline’ Deputy Chief Executive (Public Sector)

*?????? ‘The master class helped us look internally and reset our thinking and hold ourselves more accountable' - Customer service manager (utilities)

*?????? ‘The team has benefitted immensely from this master class and the impact on agents from our changed approaches is evident’ - Customer service manager (Retail)