Samaritans Awareness Day on 24^th July highlights the importance of listening to and supporting others. It’s a reminder that in difficult times, you can call them on 116 123 and speak in confidence to a trained volunteer at any time of day or night.

At Helen Pettifer Training, we often discuss signposting customers to external sources of support. However, we are taking this opportunity to encourage you to listen and support your customer-facing and call-handling employees. This July, let’s ensure sufficient measures are in place to prevent a crisis for your frontline team.

Handling Difficult Customer Conversations

To comply with Consumer Duty and other regulatory requirements, frontline teams are encouraged to identify customers facing challenging life experiences. As a result, they are regularly handling difficult conversations about financial hardship, bereavement, terminal illness, suicide and more.

Having led a call handling team, I am well aware of the compounding effect of these calls. They reduce resilience and impact health, especially when insufficient resources and support are in place. What’s more, frontline employees aren’t immune to tough life experiences. As a result, certain calls may be triggering, and a feeling of responsibility adds to their burden.

My concern is that organisations focus all their resources on customers and miss the opportunity to listen to and support frontline teams. Without preventative measures in place, we could drive our employees to a point of crisis. So, let’s explore actions that can make a difference.

Beyond the Conversation Insight

Our April ‘Beyond the Conversation’ panel discussion explored ways to support the resilience and well-being of frontline teams. It highlighted steps that organisations, team leaders and individuals can take to reduce the impact of difficult customer conversations. Some of the points raised are shared below.

Practical Actions For Organisations

• Provide voluntary options to frontline employees following difficult interactions, including a short break or a debrief with a trained facilitator.
• Break up call handling or customer-facing time with other tasks to add variety to the role, use the employee’s skills and reduce the intensity of interactions.
• Offer regular training and discussions to use real experiences to build awareness, confidence and competence.
• Introduce well-being sessions including financial advice, resilience and netwalking.

Practical Actions for Leaders

• Promote peer collaboration and recognise the importance of informal learning and emotional regulation through social interactions.
• Learn the skills to build the necessary trust and appropriate responses that enable open and non-biased discussions about well-being with your team.
• Monitor workloads and be realistic about what can be achieved without burnout. Request additional resources or time to manage peak times and other pressures.
• Adapt processes in response to feedback and ideas from the team.

Practical Actions for Individuals

• Recognise the signs that you are reaching your limits or have been emotionally triggered by a customer conversation.
• Make use of resources offered by the organisation, including breaks, activity sessions and counselling.
• Learn and apply techniques for stress management, emotional regulation, and self-care.
• Access support services to help you cope with difficult life events.

The discussion included a Q&A session, and I wanted to share some of the questions asked of the panel, with my thoughts.

How Do Small Teams Navigate Breaks After Difficult Calls?

While I accept it isn’t easy to enable frontline team members to take a short break after a difficult call, we have to consider the alternative.

A short break can be all it takes for an employee to reset emotions and regain calm to:

• Maintain professional standards with the next customer. The alternative could be a complaint, a lost customer or a damaged reputation.

• Avoid overload and burnout. The alternative is that they need to take sick leave to recover or they hand in their notice.

• Restore cognitive function to continue working productively. The alternative is inefficient work for the rest of the shift.

When you consider the alternatives, you can appreciate the value of the occasional short break. My suggestion is to prepare line managers or other non-frontline staff to step in and take a call if a team member needs a moment to recover. This support benefits the individual and the organisation.

Are Employee Assessments a Useful Way to Monitor Well-being?

One of the questions asked at the panel discussion was whether employee assessments are a valuable tool to understand the current thoughts of employees about their workload, support options and well-being.

My opinion is that they offer an overview, which is a good starting point. It can highlight areas for improvement and be used as a ‘before and after’ comparison to evidence the impact of new initiatives. However, a company culture where open and honest discussions are held with individuals and teams is usually more informative. Listen to frontline teams and explore points and ideas in greater depth to understand where improvements can be made.

Should Out-of-Hours Emails & Calls be Banned?

Another question centred around a company’s decision to stop people from accessing work emails on mobile devices. Does this help work-life balance or make things less flexible?

Firstly, this decision may be driven by a need to enhance security, rather than alter working practices. Having said this, an organisation can support employees’ work-life balance with a policy to outline times when it is and isn’t acceptable to call, or read and respond to emails.

How Does An Organisation Maintain Work-Life Balance When Increasing Opening Hours?

In my experience, change management is one of the biggest leadership challenges. The key to success is involving the team through clear communication, open consultation and a say in how a new approach could work. You want to involve everyone and listen to concerns rather than forcing change on them.

If employees hear that the opening hours are extending, they will naturally be concerned about additional pressures on their home and work life. Yet, when handled collaboratively, there could be ways that longer opening hours could be beneficial to their work-life balance. For example, providing greater flexibility on start and finish times. Or, having the option of longer working days to accrue extra leave.

Listen & Support Frontline Teams

Samaritans are keen to promote the importance of listening and supporting others to prevent a crisis. I believe this extends to your frontline teams, as well as your customers, and I trust this article gets my viewpoint across.

If you have any questions relating to equipping your team to support customers facing vulnerable customers, please join one of my free monthly Q&A events.