While customer experience continues to be the top priority for businesses, a new report reveals that 56 per cent of contact centre employees cite complex customer problems as their top challenge. And 60 per cent admit their company has left them ill-equipped to handle these problems, leaving agents stressed and unengaged.

The report, The Health of the Contact Centre: Agent Well-Being in a Customer-Centric Era, was commissioned by Calabrio, a provider of customer engagement and analytics software. It surveyed more than 1,000 contact centre employees in the UK and US to uncover the health of today’s contact centres, including agent confidence in the ability to be successful in their jobs, the challenges they face and how technology will dictate the future of the contact centre.

Empowering contact centre employees is more critical than ever as 32 per cent of respondents believe that customer problems will only become increasingly difficult over the next two years, and 45 percent worry customers will expect even more from companies.

The well-being of contact centre employees continues to decline and, if not addressed, it can ultimately affect their ability to deliver the desired customer experience. A quarter (25 per cent) of respondents say they feel stressed multiple times a week, and more than half (52 per cent) agree that their company isn’t doing enough to prevent teams from feeling burned out.

Kris McKenzie, EMEA General Manager at Calabrio said: “Brands are battling it out to deliver the right customer experience to get ahead of the competition and drive market share. What is clear, however, is if they do not rethink the contact centre strategy, they’re putting the entire customer experience at risk.

“As a cornerstone of the customer experience, brands need to implement the right technology in their contact centre but more importantly they need to focus on the people. In doing so, contact centre staff become empowered to quickly make informed decisions and deliver on the experience that customers have come to expect.”

Download the full report here.