Customer-facing workers employed in the UK contact center industry are burned out or perilously close to being so, citing heavier workloads and longer hours since the COVID-19 pandemic began, without a commensurate promotion or increase in pay, according to a new report from MaxContact, a provider of cloud-based contact center solutions.  

In its new study titled Customer Engagement Burnout, Manchester, England-based MaxContact said that of the 752 workers that were surveyed, 72% disclosed that they were burned out or faced imminent burnout from being overworked and underappreciated.

At least 52% professed that their workload had increased dramatically since the beginning of the pandemic, and 43% were contending with longer working hours. Moreover, 88% stated that the responsibilities within their existing role had expanded, but that was not accompanied by a pay increase or promotion. And because of a shortage in personnel, staff, on average, have undertaken the work of between one and two employees in addition to their own, with 10% stretched to their limit in doing the work normally performed by three or more people, the report revealed.

The contact center industry in the UK employs more than 800,000 people, according to statistics from London’s Financial Times publication cited by the report, with millions more working in other customer-facing roles in sales or phone support.

In another set of significant findings, the MaxContact report noted that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said that the companies they worked for showed more concern with ensuring the satisfaction of customers than with the well-being of employees. And more than 80% felt pressure from management to deliver quantity over quality when it came to interacting with customers.

Finally, workers said that initiatives put in place to support workers’ mental health are not having an impact. While 61% said their company possessed some type of specialist customer engagement technology to help them do their job, just 32% said their managers followed mental health initiatives “all the time.” As a result, the mental health solutions have little effect on increasing the job satisfaction of workers, the report noted.

Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, said customer-facing roles are paramount, performing as the “hidden backbone of society,” but that workers are overloaded and unhappy. To prevent workers from changing jobs or leaving the field altogether, Booth said the industry should put the well-being of frontline staff on equal footing with customer satisfaction.

“Customer engagement has a burnout problem,” the manifesto in the report stated. “As an industry, we’ve always put the customer first but if we don’t also balance this with employee needs, we will all suffer,” it said.