Fake it ’til you break it? The emotional toll of the contact centre

Once, in a busy village, there was a lantern keeper whose job was to keep the great street lantern burning through the night. Each evening, he would fill it with oil, polish the glass, and light the flame so travellers could find their way.

At first, the lantern shone brightly, and the keeper took pride in its warm glow. But over time, the villagers demanded more. “Make it brighter!” they said. “Don’t let it flicker, no matter the wind or rain!”

The keeper, eager to please, worked harder. He cleaned the glass until his hands ached, poured in extra oil, and shielded the flame from every gust of wind. But the oil was running low. No one noticed as the keeper poured from his own supply, draining himself to keep the flame alive. His hands trembled; his body weakened. But still, the lantern had to shine.

One night, as a storm rolled in, the keeper reached for the last drop of oil. But there was nothing left. The light sputtered and died, leaving the village in darkness. The people realised too late: the lantern could not shine if the keeper himself had burned out.

Much like the lantern keeper, contact centre advisers are expected to shine – always warm, always patient, always helpful – regardless of the pressure. However, maintaining that emotional glow isn’t effortless, and it comes at a significant cost.

So, how does this happen? Why does “faking it” feel so draining? And what can businesses do to support advisers before they, too, run out of fuel?

The Burden of Emotional Labour

In a contact centre, an adviser, Sarah, answers a call from a furious customer. His broadband has been down for two days, and he’s already called twice with no resolution. Before she can even introduce herself, he’s shouting.

What Sarah Feels (Internally):

• Frustration: This issue isn’t her fault, but she’s bearing the brunt of the customer’s anger.
• Stress: She’s juggling multiple calls, and the pressure to meet handling-time targets looms.
• Helplessness: She wants to fix the issue, but the technical team is still working on it.

What Sarah Must Show (Externally):

• Calmness & Patience: Even as the customer vents, she must keep her tone steady and not react emotionally.
• Empathy: She reassures him: “I completely understand how frustrating this must be for you.”
• Positivity: Even if the solution is out of her hands, she must sound reassuring, avoiding any negativity that could escalate the call.

After 15 exhausting minutes, the customer hangs up, still unsatisfied. Sarah takes a deep breath. But there’s no time to process the stress. Another call is already waiting. She resets her tone, puts on the same patient voice, and starts again.

Multiply Sarah’s experience by thousands of advisers, and the costs become staggering. Emotional exhaustion isn’t just a personal struggle; it’s a business risk, leading to absenteeism, turnover, and lost productivity.

Anyone who has worked in a contact centre might recognise this scenario. The psychological strain of constantly regulating emotions – masking frustration, maintaining empathy, and suppressing stress – defines emotional labour.

There is a cost to fakery.

The Psychological Cost of Faking It

Emotional labour is the effort required to manage and regulate emotions as part of a job, often to meet workplace expectations. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild first introduced the concept in her 1983 book The Managed Heart, where she studied flight attendants who had to remain cheerful and accommodating, regardless of how they actually felt.

Since then, emotional labour has been studied in various professions, including:

• Healthcare: Doctors and nurses must show sympathy while delivering bad news.
• Military & Emergency Services: Soldiers and first responders learn emotional detachment to manage high-stress situations.
• Leadership: Managers often express optimism despite internal concerns.

In customer service, it’s often called “service with a smile,” where workers are expected to display pleasant emotions, regardless of their own experiences. However, when the workplace is stressful or customers are rude, the emotional labour required to maintain this facade increases dramatically.

Hochschild’s theory suggests that surface acting – pretending to feel something you don’t – creates cognitive dissonance: a mental conflict between your true emotions and the emotions you’re forced to express. Over time, this leads to burnout (physical and emotional exhaustion), detachment (cynicism and disengagement), and a sense of inauthenticity (feeling like you are constantly “faking it”).

As the emotional toll of surface acting builds, employees often resort to coping mechanisms to manage the mental strain. While these mechanisms might offer temporary relief, they can mask deeper emotional issues that lead to burnout. Examples include dark humour in healthcare or emotional compartmentalisation in the military.

In contact centres, coping mechanisms include:

• Surface acting or suppression (forcing a friendly tone while feeling frustrated inside)
• Apathy (losing the ability to care about customer concerns)
• Sarcasm/dark humour (using irony or jokes as emotional distance: “Another angry customer? Must be Tuesday.”)

It can also result in what psychologists call avoidance behaviours, such as disengagement and absenteeism. Sarah might mentally or physically check out of work due to exhaustion or burnout.

When we consider personality traits, an adviser who is high in Agreeableness (naturally empathetic, patient, and cooperative) may be more vulnerable to emotional exhaustion due to their empathy or people-pleasing behaviours. Low-agreeable individuals – who are more direct or task-focused – struggle to fake empathy, and this effort increases their cognitive dissonance even further.

High-agreeable people feel the emotions, which drains them. Low-agreeable people struggle to fake emotions, which drains them. This compassion fatigue is linked to burnout, disengagement, health issues, and high attrition rates, which ultimately affect morale, performance, and customer service. For employers, the consequences can be significant.

For example, if we consider that a 2023 ONS report cited 13.3% of respondents were experiencing a shortage of workers. The business process outsourcing sector (BPO) is particularly challenged since it competes for the same demographic of staff (i.e., lower salaried and highly mobile) with retail, hospitality and many other sectors where roles are potentially less demanding than within contact centre environments. Absenteeism rates are challenging to research. A 2022 report suggests UK average absences run at 4.5 days per year. Contact centre rates had increased from just under 8 to over 11 unscheduled absences per employee in 2022. A CIPD report indicated a similar movement – though this was from 5.8 to 7.8 days (rather than instances) for the same period.

The impact of lantern keepers burning their own oil through emotional labour adds to this impact and reduces the available and productive hours further.

With understaffing and staff reductions through absence, organisations are investing in approaches to manage the resource challenges facing contact centres.

Technology is touted as a solution for this resourcing problem. Whether through self-service options for customers (i.e., mobile apps, decision-based chatbots) or AI tools (i.e., large language model chatbots and automation), organisations have embraced the search to remedy this challenge.

In 2020, global investment in AI was approximately $85.9bn. By 2023, it had surpassed $200bn and is forecast to reach $232bn this year.

The technology isn’t inherently bad, but it shifts the emotional burden. The first improvements delivered by technology impact the transactional and simple interactions; leaving the complex and more emotive interactions for advisers. Those customer complaints, emotionally charged conversations, complex account issues, and multi-product sales discussions all (currently) require a human agent.

Those simpler, transactional interactions could be considered respite – psychologically speaking – from the emotional dissonance required in the more complex discussions.

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology explored the mediating role of emotional dissonance, specifically in call centre environments. The findings indicated that emotional dissonance can lead to increased job stress and reduced well-being among agents. Another International Journal of Applied Psychology study highlighted that agents experience higher levels of burnout and reported significantly lower psychological well-being when they handled a greater ratio of complex interactions.

In short, when technology removes the simple, the psychological pressures on (the remaining) advisers increases.

If AI is here to stay – and let’s face it, it is – how can businesses rethink their approach to emotional labour? Perhaps investing in adviser wellbeing may be just as critical as investing in AI?

I don’t mean for that sentence to read as dismissive of adviser wellbeing. But sometimes, approaches to wellbeing can feel somewhat tokenistic.

Funday Fridays, office massage, yoga lessons. Research indicates that while these programmes can promote healthier behaviours and offer temporary relief, they don’t always lead to significant improvements in physical or mental health, and they fail to address the underlying causes of stress inherent in call centre roles. Studies have repeatedly highlighted approaches to job design, performance monitoring, and human resource practices impact employee well-being in call centres significantly more than these tokens.

We can’t ask employees to learn to be more fireproof, if we’re not tackling the fires in the environment.

If we can’t just throw yoga mats at the problem, what actually helps? The answer lies in how we build resilience – in individuals, teams, and the workplace itself.

Supporting Our Lantern Keepers

Instead of short-term relief, we need strategies that help advisers manage emotional strain and recover quickly from the pressures they face.

Every individual has their own baseline of resilience and resiliency – but the two terms are not interchangeable.

Resilience is like your baseline or resting heart rate; the level at which you function every day. It can be influenced by factors like age, gender, fitness, diet, sleep, and stress levels. While you can improve it somewhat through exercise and lifestyle changes, it’s largely stable.

Resiliency is like your recovery time after exertion; it reflects your ability to bounce back after emotional stress. Some people naturally bounce back quickly, while others need more time to recover. This is unique to us and is, too, affected by age, gender and physiological conditions, including our personalities.

Individuals who are high in Neuroticism might appear to be more worrisome, anxious and fret about situations more. They tend to react more quickly to stress – like lots of little sticks of dynamite with short fuses. This may provide them with a lower level of resilience (i.e., they’re always concerned about something), but a high level of resiliency (i.e., they may have over-thought and catastrophised to the point that the actual issue isn’t as large of a concern in reality).

People with low-neuroticism tend to have a longer fuse, meaning they’re less likely to react quickly to stress. But when they do experience an emotional outburst, it can be more intense.

Resiliency (and, to a lesser extent, resilience) can also be shaped by learned experiences and our cognitive frameworks. This is how we interpret stress and cope with challenges, and how these learnings can influence our ability to bounce back.

We might not be able to change the length of our fuse. But we might be able to recognise when our fuse is lit, and to either consciously choose our response to stress or to use techniques to move us back to composure.

Understanding these differences helps businesses create environments that support the unique emotional needs of each individual. By recognising that some employees recover quickly and others need more time, organisations can build stronger, more resilient teams through helping employees reframe stress and manage their emotional recovery more effectively.

Providing More Oil

We’ve met Arlie Hochschild already. Her theory introduced us to surface acting – feeling one emotion but displaying something different, which denies the feeling but takes emotional labour. But the theory also introduces the concept of deep acting.

Deep acting is genuinely feeling the required emotion. It’s a form of authenticity, which doesn’t result in the same cognitive load or dissonance as surface acting. Deep acting involves genuinely altering your internal emotional state to align with the emotions you need to display, rather than just faking it.

During Sarah’s call (our contact centre adviser with the shouting broadband customer), she forces a friendly voice and pretends to be empathetic, but internally, she’s frustrated and stressed.

Instead of just faking kindness, Sarah could remind herself that the customer is frustrated because they’re struggling, not because they dislike her personally. She could actively shift her perspective to see the customer as someone in distress rather than someone attacking her. This makes her empathy feel more genuine, reducing internal conflict and the emotional labour. She’s not using her own oil to keep the lantern burning.

The best sales people don’t sell because they fake optimism and enthusiasm (which takes emotional labour). They take the time to understand the product’s real benefits and connects them to the customer’s needs, so their enthusiasm feels authentic and is less psychologically impactful for the salesperson.

Deep acting is not about denying our initial stress response. It’s about recognising that our fuse is lit and consciously reframing the context to enable our genuine emotions to come to the surface authentically. This approach can be encouraged through empathy training, perspective-taking exercises, or reframing techniques to help advisers view difficult customer interactions in a more constructive way.

This approach is individual. Having the self-awareness to recognise when you are overextended, how you react to this over-extension (i.e., seeking conflict, detaching, being emotionally drained etc.), and having the ability to catch yourself in-the-moment to modify your response are all learnable skills at an individual level.

There are team and organisational approaches that can also help to reduce the levels of emotional labour required from advisers. For example:

• Mindfulness Opportunities: Providing resourcing space to allow a contact centre adviser 30 seconds between calls to do a deep breath exercise, resetting their emotional state before the next interaction
• Emotional Buffering: Setting boundaries (mental and/or physical) between work and personal life. An adviser might develop a ritual to transition out of work mode, such as listening to music on the way home or changing into comfortable clothes as a mental signal to leave stress behind
• Job Crafting: Allowing advisers to modify aspects of their role. They might advocate for more breaks between emotionally intense calls or request to handle a mix of complex and simpler interactions, which gives back a sense of control over their workload
• Leadership Reasonability: Organisations can reduce emotional strain by ensuring policies and leadership expectations are reasonable. Instead of enforcing strict call-time targets that force rushed interactions, management might allow extra time for emotionally demanding calls
• Emotional Intelligence Training: Developing emotional intelligence skills helps employees recognise, regulate, and express emotions in healthier ways. These could be difficult situation workshops or a space where tough calls can be discussed, debriefed and vented

A combination of personal coping techniques (like mindfulness and reframing) and organisational changes (like leadership support and job crafting) is the most effective way to manage emotional labour sustainably.

Conclusion: Keeping the Flame Alive

In our story, the lantern keeper toiled until he had nothing more to give. Only then did the people realise: the lantern could not shine if the keeper himself had burned out.

The same is true for contact centre advisers. If we expect them to shine endlessly – no matter the pressure, no matter the storm – without refuelling them, they will eventually burn out. And when that happens, organisations don’t just lose advisers; they lose the very thing that makes customer service work: human connection.

AI and other technologies are increasing the complexity of adviser interactions. Attracting and retaining talent is becoming tougher. Customer expectations and demands are increasing. Absenteeism is heading northwards, leading to further resourcing pressures. This is some storm our advisers are living through.

So, what’s the alternative? Businesses that thrive in the long term will be those that stop treating emotional resilience as an individual responsibility alone. Instead, they will design environments that support psychological recovery, balance emotional labour, and provide advisers with the tools to genuinely connect with customers, without losing themselves in the process.

We might start by auditing current adviser wellbeing initiatives. Are they actually helping, or just surface-level fixes?

Do we have an environment (culture) that necessitates our advisers to deal with higher levels of stress and emotional labour? Is there toxic positivity? Do our processes work effectively or are we asking advisers to paper-over cracks with a smile and a wave? We can’t ask advisers to be more fireproof if we’re not also putting out the fires.

If businesses continue to invest in technology without investing in people, they’ll find themselves automating not just efficiency, but the very humanity that makes great customer service possible.

The real question is: are we willing to invest as much in our people as we do in AI? Because if we don’t, we won’t need automation to replace advisers: burnout will do it for us.

References

CIPD. (2022). Health and wellbeing at work survey report 2022. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Grandey, A. A., Diefendorff, J. M., & Rupp, D. E. (2013). Emotional labor in the 21st century: Diverse perspectives on emotion regulation at work. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203147607

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520930414

Hülsheger, U. R., Lang, J. W., & Maier, G. W. (2010). Emotional labor, strain, and performance: Testing reciprocal relationships in a longitudinal panel study. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 15(4), 505–521. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021003

Office for National Statistics. (2023). Labour market overview, UK: October 2023. Office for National Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/uklabourmarketoctober2023

Zapf, D., Vogt, C., Seifert, C., Mertini, H., & Isic, A. (1999). Emotion work as a source of stress: The concept and development of an instrument. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 8(3), 371–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/135943299398230