1. From an emotional labor perspective, how does dealing with an abusive customer lead to stress and burnout? Emotional labor, as defined from the book, is an employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work. In a workplace like a customer-service call center, interactions between customers and agents are done through phones. Agents are ordered to show positive emotions to keep the customers happy. Agents, even though they feel something else must try to display other else just to be able to comply with the company’s policy.
If the agent is dealing with an abusive customer, their conversation could lead the agent to feel stress by having their felt emotions compromised by their displayed emotions and this could lead them to burn out if they have no outlet. Stress can accumulate and could lead to burn out as well as emotional breakdown if not taken out or relieved. 2. If you were a recruiter for a customer-service call center, what personality types would you prefer to hire and why?
In other words, what individual differences are likely to affect whether an employee can handle customer abuse on a day-to-day basis? If I’m a recruiter for a customer-service call center, I would prefer to hire people who are less of the feeling personality from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Also, I would prefer people who have personalities with medium level of affect intensity. A person who is high on affect intensity may overreact or get too defensive when a customer tries to be tough on them.
They may also become highly emotional and that could result in them retaliating on the customer or breaking down mentally as well as emotionally. Adversely, a person with low level of affect intensity may become insensitive to the customer as well to the needs of their customers. 3. Emotional Intelligence is one’s ability to detect and to manage emotional cues and information. How might emotional intelligence play a role in responding to abusive customers? What facets of emotional intelligence might employees possess who are able to handle abusive customers?
Emotional Intelligence, as defined by researchers Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. Being able to monitor your emotions or identify what’s the other person on the line’s emotion, you’ll be able to understand and sympathize with them and through showing that you care and you wanted to help them may create a good relationship between you and that customer.
Also, as part of emotional intelligence, the ability to control one’s felt emotion could play a big part in handling an abusive customer. This may take form of holding back anger and rage, being calm even when compromised in an argumentative situation, or being patient. Having control would prevent emotional outburst that could lead to arguments or fights. 4. What steps should companies take to ensure that their employees are not the victims of customer abuse? Should companies allow a certain degree of abuse if the abuse results in satisfied customers and perhaps greater profit?
What are the ethical implications of this? Companies can ensure that their employees are not victims of customer abuse by constantly monitoring how their employees are doing, try to ask them if they’re having problems with their work. They may also ask their employees to pass the call to their supervisors if they are already experiencing abuse from their customer. Companies may also provide recreational areas or activities for their employees to relieve out stress that had been built by abusive calls.
By this, build up or accumulation of stress that could lead to burn out or emotional outburst can be avoided. Ethically speaking, customer-service call center agents are also human and companies should not allow at some degree for customers to just abuse them. Companies should also protect the rights of their employees as their employer. It’s true that customer satisfaction is important to companies but at some certain point, agents or employees must be protected from them because these bully and abusive customers can be too much for an employee to handle and could lead to breakdown.
