How Contact Center Downtime Affects Employee Performance

How Downtime Affects Employee Performance

Do you know how contact center downtime affects employee performance in your organization? In today’s blog, we’re going to explore what happens to things like frontline engagement, productivity and trust when the contact center experiences an outage. It’s all part of ongoing series where we’re revealing the costly impact of downtime. You can learn more about the financial costs by reading last week’s blog.

What’s been your experience with how employees react to unplanned outages? Over the last twenty years, I’ve held both frontline and leadership roles in the contact center and often encounter mixed feelings about the impact of an outage on employees. For some, the unexpected (albeit temporary) relief from answering inbound customer contacts is viewed as a blessing in disguise. Most frequently, this is in the case of environments where customers are regularly abusive or employee workloads are teetering on the brink of burnout. In other words, the contact centers that get excited about unplanned outages are, to be blunt, dysfunctional.

The typical employee doesn’t appreciate it when downtime affects their ability to do their job. Believe it or not but most contact center employees genuinely want to help the people that contact them. They count on the underlying systems to have reliable accessibility and need tools and processes that simplify their workflows. The employee impact of an outage is not just about the frustration of the system going down and the best in class organizations understand that downtime can lead to deeper, more complicated problems.

Lost productivity is the negative effect of downtime that is perhaps most often thought of when considering the impacts on employees. A business can’t recover the unproductive time that employees spent waiting for the outage to be restored. Those expenses alone can be quite costly, but the lost productivity doesn’t end there. The disruption of an outage often leads to employee complaints about unreliable systems, which results in leaders spending unplanned time addressing people problems. Suddenly the costs of lost productivity are exponentially larger.

If system outages or latency happen often enough, they’ll also be a contributing factor to employee disengagement. In 2015, I spent a series of weeks interviewing hundreds of contact center agents to gain insight on what contributes to their success and engagement at work. The second most important factor was whether or not they had reliable tools and systems. It makes sense—agents expect to have what they need to do their job effectively. Who wouldn’t? For this reason, agents need to understand why an outage happened and if or how it can be prevented in the future. If they’re told to “deal with it” or something similarly dismissive, it’s the equivalent of telling them that you don’t care whether or not they can do their job. You may not mean it but, over time, these statements lead employees down a path of disengagement and contribute to distrust in leadership.