Workforce Management Featured Article
Using AI to Treat the Global Problem of Job Burnout
One of the biggest threats to the global workforce is a condition that has been overlooked and underplayed for decades. Employee burnout can encompass a broad range of symptoms and behaviors, including exhaustion, absenteeism, job dissatisfaction and lack of motivation. While not yet an epidemic, job burnout is definitely on the rise, and this past May was classified as a mental health condition by the World Health Organization.
Employee burnout not only puts workers at risk, but endangers the organizations that employ them in the form of increased insurance costs, high turnover rates and of course major drops in productivity and efficiency. This phenomenon is definitely on the rise, with a recent Gallup poll of 7,500 full-time workers indicating that 44 percent felt burned out at least some of the time, while 23 percent felt burned out very often or, in the worst case scenario, always.
The issue of job burnout permeates pretty much all sectors of the global workforce, but the contact center may be one of the most susceptible markets. Already fraught with high turnover rates and noteworthy employee dissatisfaction, burnout in the contact center negatively impacts employees and employer performance alike, not to mention customer service levels. AI is already making inroads in the contact center, offering much needed automation and support for human agents. Now developers are looking at AI technologies as a way to offset and prevent employee burnout.
AI solutions are already being incorporated in contact center platforms to handle routine, repetitive requests and tasks, freeing up human agents to focus on high-level interactions. AI can also fill the role of job coach and personal assistant, guiding agents during difficult and stressful customer interactions and quickly supplying history and data that may aid with a specific query or task. So it stands to reason that AI has a significant role to play in diffusing the job burnout phenomenon, simply by handling some of the heavy lifting in terms of work volume.
But AI solutions can provide more than quantity and also offer aid with stressful and challenging customer interactions, one of the biggest contributors to mental and emotional burnout for contact center workers. In fact, AI solutions like Cogito’s, which analyzes human behavior through voice and other metrics, is specifically designed to come to the aid of employees engaging in particularly stressful or emotionally difficult interactions.
Emotional intelligence may very well be the next step in the evolution of AI, and Cogito’s solution is one of the early entrants, offering major benefits to the contact center and customer service space. AI technology has the potential to create happier and more productive human agents with significantly lower rates of churn and job burnout.
To spread the word about how AI is being integrated into the contact center and customer service space, TMC (News - Alert) is hosting a Future of Work Expo in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The event, which will take place from February 12-14, 2020, will explore how AI and machine learning may be used to improve business communications, collaboration, sales and marketing and contact centers and customer service.
Edited by Ken Briodagh
