Help desk support can sometimes be overwhelming and stressful. Research shows that people who work in help desk support positions can suffer from compassion fatigue, which is why customers may sometimes complain of being treated more like paperwork instead of like an actual person.
Compassion fatigue may cause your internal help desk support team to suffer from disengagement, anxiety, and total burn out among other things. Since internal help desk support teams play such an important role in the overall success of your business, making sure this compassion fatigue isn't seen and felt by your customers is imperative.
Here are the top three ways an overworked internal help desk support team can impact your customers:
1. Lack of Follow Up: One of the main reasons why a customer leaves your company is because they feel like you don’t care about them anymore. Usually when a customer has issues that need to be addressed, the internal help desk support team member will either solve it on their own or refer it to someone who can solve it. Most of the time however, this involves the whole department.
Your overworked team will do its best to resolve issues and follow up with customers, but fatigue may cause the team to forget about certain customers, which could lead to no follow up at all. When your internal team fails to follow up, customers who still have lingering issues will feel that your company doesn’t care about their needs and concerns.
2. Poor Decision Making: Your internal help desk support team does need some idle time even when at work. The more the idle time, the more positive effects it will have on your employees. Without a break, your internal team will feel like the phone is always off the hook, or they’re always on the computer. This means there’s an urgency to solve the customer's issue in the shortest time possible in order to catch a breath.
This can only translate to one thing for your support team and business; poor decision making. For example, one of your internal team members may be so tired from dealing with difficult customers all day that they aren't in the right mindset to speak with a customer and that customer has a bad experience. What if that customer cancels their monthly service subscription because of this bad experience? The customers are ultimately the ones who stand to suffer as a result of poor decision making on your team's behalf.
3. Unpredictable Service: According to a National Research Center survey of over 1,000 consumers, 75% said they were at one time upset by help desk reps online while 71% said they were upset at the premises. As it turns out, the reps are not entirely to blame but work overload is. 73% of support professionals have described not having complete control of their work as their greatest challenge. Since your internal help desk support team doesn't know what awaits them each day, they will never be able to offer your customers consistent services. Say you are assisting customer A, but urgent messages keep popping up from customers B and C. This competition among customers will mean that customer A may not get all the attention and quality they may need and deserve.
Help desk support often means prioritizing your customers’ needs, and when fatigue skews your prioritization, this can sometimes come at a high price. When the internal help desk team starts to feel overworked they may suffer from "compassion fatigue." One of the best ways to combat this is to partner with an outsourced help desk support team. These teams bring a wealth knowledge and predictable, repeatable processes that can help the team, and the organization, become more efficient and more productive.
We invite you to download our complimentary eBook, "10 Common Help Desk Challenges & Concerns that Impact Companies Today". You can also click here to speak to our team of help desk experts.