The vaccine customer service staff must use now

• Are you or your frontline customer service team feeling anxious or stressed about providing face to face customer service?

• Do you worry about the future of your frontline customer service team or your own frontline customer service job?

Frontline customer services staff are rightly feeling a range of negative emotions at the moment and that’s normal and it’s natural because that’s the human response to a pandemic, but there is some good news. Frontline staff have a vaccine to help protect them and although it won’t stop them being infected by the Corona Virus, it can vaccinate against fear, anger and all of the negative emotions that if left undetected or unaddressed, can lead to serious mental health issues.

The vaccine is called Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and we can and should all access it now.

What is EQ? Much has been written about emotional intelligence – and more specifically its value in the workplace – but the concept of emotional intelligence is not new. Years of research and testing has shown that our human brains are hardwired to give emotions the upper hand. The limbic system (the emotional brain) reacts to events first, before we have the opportunity to engage the rational brain (cortex).

Example: customer arrives in a negative mood and blames you for having to wait for service. Your first response will be emotional - you will feel something. You may feel shocked, annoyed or even angry and unless you have the ability to regulate those emotions, your response to the challenging customer may be unprofessional.

Unprofessional communication leads to a higher level of anxiety and stress and if the interaction continues with both staff and customer communicating negatively, the customer will leave looking for somewhere to put all that negativity and staff will be left behind to serve the next customer. Frontline staff have to ‘hold it in’ until they get a break and a chance to vent and ‘holding it in’ means other customer may feel their negativity too.

Unhappy customers will immediately seek to share their negative experience far and wide. That’s what we do when we are unhappy customers; we seek to share what happened so we can feel heard, feel respected and feel valued. We don’t hold it in because we don’t have to and becuase we expected more for our money and/or time.

To help us understand what EQ is, I’m sharing with you a definition influenced by a few theories, and mainly popularised by Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence. Daniel Goleman, considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject, explains emotional intelligence as having five components:

1. Self-awareness: The ability to recognise and understand your personal moods, emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others. Self-awareness depends on your ability to monitor your own emotional state and to correctly identify and name your emotions.

2. Self-regulation: The ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods and the propensity to suspend judgement and to think before acting.

3. Internal motivation: A passion to work for internal reasons that go beyond external rewards such as money and status.

4. Empathy: The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people and treat people according to their emotional reactions.

5. Social skills: The proficiency to manage relationships, build networks, find common ground and build rapport.

As you can see by Daniel’s 5 Components, Emotional intelligence is a part of us that impacts every aspect of our life. When working on developing your EQ, remembering that our emotions are not the ‘enemy’ is important. Our emotions contain valuable information that, if used properly, can help you make sound decisions and keep us out of harms way. The aim is not to stop negative emotions, it’s to understand them and manage them according to the environment.

Much is still to be learned about the human brain and how it works but for now, for frontline customer service staff to ride the wave of COVID19 or for you to lead a frontline customer service team during COVID19, remember that emotional intelligence is the vaccine that will strengthen and protect us all from a pandemic of negativity.

If you would like to develop a deeper understanding of EQ and why people may behave differently in the same situations, I recommend our DISC program .

If you are looking for practical ways to keep your team positive and engaged if working offiste or from home, we highly recommend a Membership to our on-line platform - The Service Excellence Zone.

By Cate Schreck - Author of “The A- Z of Service Excellence”