What is call center burnout? The full guide to recognizing, preventing, and overcoming it

No matter what industry you’re in, call center burnout is an ever-present challenge that affects both employees and businesses.

It’s a well-known fact that call centers are especially stressful environments, with no shortage of supporting research. According to Gartner, the median attrition rate among customer service reps is 25%. 

Even though call center agents aren’t in senior roles, they are still costly to recruit, hire, and train—especially when you have large teams. The most cost-effective way to address this is still to retain agents whenever you can, and one way to increase call center retention (besides compensating employees fairly) is to tackle call center burnout as early as possible. Overall, one in four employees are burnt out, and it’s fair to estimate that this number is even higher in call centers.

As an SDR leader, burnout is something we strategize for constantly—it’s an especially important problem to address early because sales reps have an added layer of pressure in their roles: quotas that they have to hit every month. In this guide, we’ll explore what call center burnout is, how to identify early signs, and the best strategies I’ve found to prevent and overcome it before it becomes a more serious issue.

What is call center burnout?

Call center burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged and excessive stress in a call center environment. It’s often a result of a mix of heavy workloads, repetitive tasks, and challenging customer interactions. 

This burnout can severely impact agents’ and reps’ well-being and productivity, leading to increased turnover rates—and ultimately, lower sales performance and conversion rates (or if you’re in a support-focused call center, service quality).

What is the difference between burnout and fatigue?

Burnout and fatigue are related but distinct concepts. Fatigue typically refers to physical or mental tiredness that can result from temporary overexertion or lack of rest. 

Burnout, on the other hand, is a deeper, chronic state of exhaustion that affects someone’s ability to function effectively over the long term due to prolonged stress and dissatisfaction. 

While you can usually alleviate fatigue with extra rest, burnout requires a more comprehensive approach to address underlying causes and restore your employees’ well-being.

Who experiences burnout?

Burnout can affect anyone working in a high-stress environment, like lawyers and healthcare workers, and in call centers, it’s usually the call center agents who experience severe burnout.

They often face high call volumes and have to manage sometimes angry or frustrated customers, which makes them more susceptible to burnout. Frontline workers in customer service and sales, who frequently deal with demanding customers and the pressures of hitting quota, are especially at risk.

How call center burnout impacts a business

Call center burnout isn’t just bad for your employee experience—it also impacts the business overall in a few ways:

Decreased productivity

When someone is burned out, they often can’t handle tasks with the same level of speed or effectiveness that they’re normally able to, and agents are no different. Burned out call center agents tend to be less engaged and efficient and engagement, impacting overall productivity.

Higher employee turnover

This side effect is pretty well established—persistent call center agent burnout can drive your employees to leave, which increases recruitment and training costs.

Increased absenteeism

On a related note, even if your call center agents don’t outright leave right away, they may just not show up to work as consistently. 

Burnout often results in more frequent sick leave and absenteeism, disrupting operations. And these instances of sick leave aren’t just for general tiredness either—according to research by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, of the separate components of burnout, exhaustion was strongly related to future diseases of the circulatory system, while cynicism was strongly related to future diseases of the digestive system. In other words, burned out employees are genuinely more at risk of future illness. 

Lower customer satisfaction

Burnout affects your customers too. Exhausted agents often struggle to provide high-quality service, leading to decreased customer satisfaction.

Damaged company or brand reputation

The end result of all of these impacts, from high turnover rate to poor customer service, is of course damage to your brand. Because call center agents are typically in support roles, the most direct and immediate effects are usually seen in customer reviews (whether that’s on social media or third-party review sites) about declining customer service or long wait times. 

From a sales call center perspective, the impacts are more often seen on growth and revenue, since burnout can make your sellers less effective at booking meetings and closing deals.

What causes call center burnout?

According to McKinsey’s research, when asked about aspects of their jobs that negatively impact their mental health and well-being, employees most often cite the feeling of always being on call, unfair treatment, unreasonable workloads, low autonomy, and lack of social support.

That being said, there are a few specifics in the call center environment that can contribute to burnout:

Long work hours and high call volumes

Continuous high volumes of calls is one major factor that can overwhelm your employees and lead to burnout. This impacts agents on both the customer service and sales side—larger companies can receive hundreds or even thousands of customer support inquiries every day, while sales reps on teams with aggressive call targets might have to make the same number of calls on a daily basis.

Extended shifts can also lead to chronic fatigue and increased stress levels as the relentless pressure makes it harder for agents to maintain performance. The cumulative effect of these factors can really erode employees' engagement and productivity, further exacerbating the cycle of burnout.

Digital overload and information saturation

With access to more data than ever before, sales leaders sometimes find it tempting to bombard agents with an overwhelming amount of information.

While some information is definitely useful, too much too fast can lead to cognitive fatigue and stress. And if your call center agents also have to constantly shift focus between multiple systems to access that information or do different tasks, this can also make it difficult for them to stay organized and do their jobs.

Ideally, call center teams should have a streamlined tech stack that helps agents do everything they need to in a single platform, to reduce app fatigue.

Strict policies and micromanagement

Excessively strict policies and micromanagement can create a high-pressure environment where agents feel constant scrutiny and lack autonomy. 

While some guidelines are useful, it’s not helpful when management imposes overly rigid rules on agents because it undermines their sense of control and job satisfaction. 

This micromanagement approach can also stifle creativity and independence, and make agents feel undervalued and disempowered, which exacerbates feelings of burnout as they struggle to meet expectations without the flexibility to adapt their approach or take ownership of their work.

Limited resources and outdated technology

This doesn’t get highlighted often, but the tools your call center agents use can also contribute to burnout by hindering their ability to do their jobs efficiently. 

Every call center has demanding targets—and while those might be imposed by C Suite and out of the control of your call center leaders, you can help your agents by, at the very least, equipping them with up-to-date tools and systems. 

For example, can you provide real-time coaching to help agents quickly answer tough questions from customers? (AI-powered platforms like Dialpad Ai Contact Center has features that are designed to help support agents and sales reps with this—we use Dialpad Ai’s sales features to automate this kind of live coaching for our sellers.)

Common call center burnout symptoms

With more and more contact centers operating remotely, it’s getting harder for managers to spot when their agents or reps are struggling. Here are a few red flags to keep an eye on:

Exhaustion and avoidance of work

Usually, this manifests as decreased productivity, increased call avoidance and absenteeism, and more frequent requests for time off. On a day-to-day basis, you should also look for signs of disengagement during virtual meetings (like a lack of participation or responsiveness). 

Regular one-on-one check-ins and surveys can be helpful because they give you a chance to observe any subtle changes in behavior, address issues early and provide support before burnout becomes too severe.

Deteriorating performance

This one is a little more straightforward. Often, simply tracking metrics such as call center occupancy, call resolution rates, average handling times, or customer complaints will be enough to tip managers off if agents are starting to get burned out. 

(Yet another reason to do performance reviews and analyze your contact center data regularly!)

Elevated turnover rates

Again, it’s relatively easy to notice trends in turnover rates by analyzing HR metrics—work with your HR team to pull data on things like the frequency of resignations, as well as trends in employee tenure and recruitment costs. 

This will help give you insights into underlying causes of turnover and any patterns that might be contributing to higher turnover rates.

How to prevent burnout in a call center in 7 ways

Prevention is cheaper than the cure, and it’s always more advantageous to get ahead of call center burnout if you can. Here are seven call center best practices that can help with that:

1. Implement flexible scheduling

If you’re not doing this already, allow flexible shifts and remote work options to give your agents more of a sense of control and reduce stress.

2. Provide adequate training

Always, always equip your call center agents with the skills, training, and resources they need to handle customer interactions effectively. This includes a detailed onboarding program, an online Help Center for agents, and ongoing updates to training whenever possible.

The tools that you use can be very helpful here—for example, we’re leveraging AI to help our SDRs on sales calls. For example, Dialpad’s Ai Agent Assists can pull up helpful information and content for sales reps if they need to answer tricky questions about pricing or features.

We can create these real-time assist cards for any topic we want, and Dialpad Ai will automatically detect when trigger words (like “price” or “Competitor X’s name”) is spoken on a call and pop up that content for our sales team:

It’s a great way of empowering agents and making sure they feel confident in any call—without having a manager hold their hand every step of the way.

3. Set realistic goals

Make sure your call center’s performance targets are tough, but achievable. Otherwise, it not only skews perception of agents’ performance during review cycles, it also negatively impacts morale because agents are always feeling under pressure because they think they’re underperforming.

4. Advocate for employee wellness

To combat the stress of any work environment—call center or not—general wellness initiatives are always helpful. 

As a starting point, comprehensive support programs, mental health resources, flexible scheduling, and regular breaks can all help reduce stress and improve work-life balance. Once a quarter or once a year, send out a survey to ask your employees for feedback—and equally importantly, take action on their recommendations when possible. We do this at Dialpad, and it helps agents feel valued, and provides a sense of autonomy and control for our employees.

5. Recognize and reward efforts

Whether it’s in the form of a dashboard that fosters some friendly competition or quarterly bonuses, make sure your team has some way of acknowledging and rewarding your call center agents’ hard work. It’ll boost morale—and motivation.

6. Promote team building

Most teams have off-sites and regular social hangouts, whether they’re in-person or remote. Your call center team should have the chance to do the same. Try to organize team-building activities at least once a quarter to strengthen relationships in the team and improve job satisfaction.

7. Ensure proper staffing levels

Finally, maintain appropriate staffing levels. You don’t want to overstaff, but you should have enough agents to manage call volumes without overloading the team. You could vary these levels depending on the team—for example, if you had to choose, you might have a leaner “lower-stress” team that handles general inquiries while having more agents available on a more stressful team that manages complaints or cancellations. (If you have an especially large team, there are workforce optimization tools, like Playvox, that are great for this.)

How to overcome call center burnout: 4 tips

Burnout isn’t always fully preventable, so what should you do if burnout has taken a hold of your team? Here are four ways to do it:

Encourage regular breaks

Encourage agents to take time off and recharge—some companies enforce a mandatory minimum amount of time off every year.

Offer support and counseling

Provide mental health resources and professional support. Call center agents especially should have access to this, and many companies provide this through their health benefits and/or insurance plans as part of their compensation packages.

Provide access to coaching and mentoring

Set up structured programs where employees receive regular one-on-one sessions with experienced mentors or coaches. These sessions can offer personalized support, guidance, and practical strategies to address burnout, improve skills, and foster professional growth.

Introduce stress management activities

Regular wellness programs (such as mindfulness workshops, exercise sessions, or relaxation techniques) are good for prevention, but they’re also helpful for employees who are already burned out. 

If you’re in charge of scheduling, you might consider integrating short, scheduled breaks throughout the workday for agents so they can step away briefly if they need to and reset before resuming their work.

What role does management play in preventing call center burnout?

Contact center management teams and leaders play a crucial role in preventing call center burnout, from creating a supportive work environment to setting realistic expectations and providing adequate resources and training. 

It’s also their responsibility to implement strategies to reduce stress and recognize when employees need a break—not all agents can recognize early call center burnout signs, and managers who have led call center teams for a long time are more skilled at noticing symptoms before their teams get burned out.

How to use technology to combat call center burnout

As I touched on earlier, the tools you give your agents are an important piece of tackling burnout. Here are a few examples:

Automated call distribution

Some contact center solutions come with good ACD features that can help you manage call volumes and send calls to fresh agents to reduce the chances of any one agent getting overwhelmed.

AI-powered assistants

AI tools can handle routine inquiries and answer simple questions, which can reduce wait times and workloads for agents. But more importantly, AI can also provide support directly to agents—for example, by pulling information for them without them having to search the FAQs, and by summarizing calls to reduce the amount of manual data entry they have to do.

Performance analytics

For managers, analytics are key—every agent has different coaching needs and comes to your call center with different levels of experience. Make sure to regularly monitor performance and identify areas for improvement and support.

Increase communication

How can technology help with call center communication to reduce the chances of burnout? This typically flies under the radar, but we’ve found that making it easy for agents (especially on distributed teams) to ask their teammates or managers questions via a messaging tool is helpful. 

Your tools should also communicate with each other. For example, your sales or support team’s CRM system should integrate with your core communication tools to streamline information sharing and reduce manual data entry. This alleviates repetitive work, and allows your agents to focus on higher-value and impactful tasks like talking to your customers.

Avoid call center burnout with Dialpad Ai Contact Center

Call center burnout affects employees and businesses in almost every industry, but it can be managed and prevented with the right strategies. 

By understanding the causes, symptoms, and impacts of burnout, and implementing the right solutions, you can improve your agents’ well-being and improve productivity while creating a more positive work environment. 

Learn how call center teams are using Dialpad Ai Contact Center to empower both agents and managers to do their work more effectively. Book a product tour now!