Events like Black Friday can really affect the IT team's mental health

54 per cent of IT and BPO staff suffer from depression, anxiety and insomnia caused by their work

Black Friday was a landmark event this year for retailers, particularly online and e-commerce companies. However, there can be a hidden risk to the mental health of IT and customer service teams. Coping with higher levels of requests, handling pushy customers and dealing with stressful environments can all affect your team over time.

From a business perspective, providing great service is held up as essential to maintaining profitability. During events like Black Friday, it can have a long-term impact too - The Institute of Customer Service released research findings that customers who experienced 'excellent' service during Black Friday 2017 went back and spent more at those companies during 2018. The average spend by these loyal customers was calculated as £205.40 - this equates to £53 more per person compared to those shoppers who rated their service experience as 'good' rather than 'excellent'.

So, are you looking at the whole picture when it comes to your team and service over time?

Black Friday by the numbers

While not quite hitting the heady heights predicted, Black Friday was still a strong event for e-commerce and online retailers. BDO reported that like-for-like sales online grew by 30.8 per cent, and that this was the most successful week since 2014.

However, such an influx of sales does lead to increases in returns and to more customer requests for assistance. Our own data on Black Friday request levels found the following:

• Overall, incoming ticket volume increased by 70 per cent in total compared to standard activity levels
• Chat and messaging channel requests went up more than 86 per cent, showing that the move to online retailing channels is matched by more online service requests
• Social media is also proving to be popular with customers when they can't reach a brand directly on the phone or email. There was a 42 per cent increase in tickets logged through Twitter and Facebook compared to standard levels of requests

Normally, companies have to plan how to handle this influx of additional requests. Around a third of companies recruited in additional staff, while the rest made do with their existing teams.

Dealing with pressure - helping your team to cope

Mental health involves thinking both long-term and short-term measures. In the short term, supporting your team means ensuring that each agent can get a break after any particularly difficult calls or interactions, and that everyone has the chance to step away from their desk for periods during a shift.

However, keeping teams healthy is about more than simply letting staff take a walk during their working time; instead, there has to be a consideration of the long-term impact that agents can face. Whatever kind of team you manage, stress can be a significant challenge in IT, and one that has to be dealt with all the time. For example, a team at the Department of General Medicine at Bharath University found that around 54 per cent of IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) staff suffered from depression, anxiety and insomnia caused by their work.

Looking at areas like work-life balance can help; more importantly, agents should see the results of their work being valued effectively. This is a more long-term goal, rather than a short-term or one-off instance.

Showing that service and helpdesk interactions are being used to create insights and feed back into the wider business can be much more powerful over time. This consolidation of data from multiple channels into more focused insight not only helps the business find out interesting things about their customers; it also shows that those interactions make a difference. For customer service teams, this is evidence that their work genuinely matters and they can take pride in their results.

This kind of context can be useful for both business stakeholders and for service desk teams. Explaining why customers are reacting in specific ways - or why results went the way they did - requires context. Without this, it is all too easy for stakeholders to treat service calls as a 'numbers game' rather than people interacting with people.

Lessons to learn for 2019

Planning ahead around these big retail events is essential - from recruiting the right additional customer service staff through to getting a complete view of customer engagement and experience. For the next year, retail IT teams will have to look at how they can improve their ability to capture data around customer experience - whether this is from website visits, direct interactions or in-store shopping - and customer service teams should work on providing context around metrics back to the business.

Alongside these projects, looking at mental health projects internally can help in two ways. First, it can help put more focus on the value that teams deliver over time. Secondly, it can help you put more context around customers across to stakeholders. Both of these can help you stress the value of good customer support back to the business.

Simon Johnson is General Manager UKI at Freshworks