The Effect of Call Center Agent Burnout on Employee Engagement

Call center organizations have become important contact centers for various fields to conduct customer service. Within the automotive industry, call centers are used for emergency roadside assistance. The customer service representatives who are responsible for handling roadside assistance may be managing various issues, including burnout, which may carry over into their performance and ability to properly service customers. The relationships between burnout and employee engagement for inbound emergency roadside assistance agents were not well understood. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between customer service representatives’ level of burnout and employee engagement. A quantitative, cross-sectional research design was used with a sample size of at least 394 participants who worked in inbound call centers that provided emergency roadside assistance using Survey Monkey participant pool. The data were analyzed in SPSS to analyze the relationship between burnout and employee engagement for call center representatives measured by instruments including the Regulatory Focus, Work Engagement, and Job Burnout Model, The Maslach Burnout Inventory – General Survey, and the 2020 US Census. Key findings include that there is correlation between engagement and burnout as well as burnout and demographics. The research may promote positive social change by providing call center leadership and advocates with research and suggestions they can potentially use to reduce burnout within call centers.