Are all the cranky customers being routed to my phone?

“When you unplug your headset, you disconnect from all the noise. The voices, the static, disappear.  All you hear is peaceful silence. The same thing happens with our minds. They are filled with constantly whirling thoughts and feelings and endless chatter. I discovered that when I unplugged mentally it all stopped. All I heard was silence. I felt calm and at peace.” — A conversation between Isabel, the wise woman and Olivia, the struggling service rep. From the book, The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey
Chances are we’ve all had a Monday like this:

Monday 7:55 AM.
Your weekend did not go well. You arrive at work in a bad mood. Instead of feeling rested and ready to handle whatever your customers can dish out, you feel tense and edgy.  You know from experience that if you can’t shake your negative attitude, you won’t have the emotional control and patience necessary to handle the more challenging calls — calls from frustrated, often irate customers. You believe that if the first few calls of the day go well it is a sign that the rest of the day will go the same way.

Monday 8:35 AM.
By the fifth call of the day you are convinced that an Evil Force is at work. It is picking out every cranky customer waiting in the queue and routing it to your phone. You suspect that your negative attitude and lack of patience may be part of the problem, but you can’t seem to stop yourself.

If you asked Isabel, the wise woman in the story, what you should do to stop yourself from spinning out of control, she would give you the same advice she gave to Olivia. And that is to go somewhere quiet, away from the chaos, and simply “unplug” for a few minutes.

With stress-related health problems and employee absences on the rise, more companies are looking for low-cost solutions for reducing the stress of their customer-facing employees.  One such solution is to provide a quiet room. A place of refuge where employees can go to relax for a few minutes and unplug.

Thanks to my client Barbara Moore, I had the opportunity to see such room during a recent visit to Progress Energy’s Technology  Support Center.
Employees use the room regularly, she told me. (see photo)

If your company doesn’t have a designated quiet room where employees can go when they need to, why not suggest it? If you are fortunate enough to have a room at your company, take advantage of the opportunity to use it every day.  It can make the difference between a good Monday and bad one.

Share what you know!
For those of you who have a designated quiet room, please take a couple of minutes to complete a very brief on-line survey which will ask you about guidelines for use of the room, etc. I will report the results in next Monday’s Aha!. Who knows? Maybe we can start a “Quiet Room” movement that will get more companies to offer these mini-refuges.

Make it a good week!