Now that many of us became Customer Service Agents …
With COVID-19 many of us have gotten an unexpected taste of what the daily life of a customer service agent is really like. You hardly engage with your colleagues since you are constantly focused on your own correspondence via phone, video, email or chat. Fifty contacts a day have become your standard? For a Customer Service Agent this is an average day.
Along with very little breaks
Many professions are exhausting, but most of the time, you have your team to chat with here and there plus lunch breaks to get some air. Chatting with colleagues in the office kitchen? That’s a break too. Customer Service Agents are seldom able to engage in these. Are you going out for lunch these days? Eating quickly at your desk has turned into the new norm. For a customer service agent, unfortunately, it’s like this most of the time.
Your team makes your day and success
Plenty of professions are draining. Most of the time, you do have your team to chat with and blow off some steam. They help you get through the day. Sometimes you are even solving problems “on the go” together which you were not even aware of. These days you feel as if you have to solve these issues on your own. It’s because you cannot just drop by in your colleagues’ office or desk, asking for opinions to form your own. The body language is missing too. Body language is universal. Replying to someone is one thing, but truly connecting to somebody is very different, right? Body language is actually feeling the conversation.
Imagine the daily communication for Customer Service Agents. It is always one-sided, you rarely have body language and you are there to solely solve the problems on the other end of the line.
Isolation in your daily job
Having a profession which involves plenty of direct human contact used to sound nice. But to generally serve another human, day in and day out, is challenging. And there is this emotional isolation that is the nature of a Customer Service job, too.
During COVID-19, we have slowly begun to express a more appropriate appreciation and really recognize the ones that serve our basic needs every day as human and not as part of a giant cogwheel. Because we are experiencing it ourselves now.
