Being served by someone who’s stressed

Prefer to listen?

Seriously. We’re all a little stressed out and wound up… me included.

I wear an Oura Ring, and halfway through last year a new feature appeared on the app, Daytime Stress. Well, what an eye-opener! It’s given me a whole new awareness of my physiological stress responses – both physical and mental – to different internal and external factors. Internal factors, for example, can include a lack of sleep or illness. External factors can include things like work-related stress, alcohol and social activities.

Sometimes stress is helpful – the kind that protects you from danger. However, often our bodies respond as if we were in danger when we aren’t; and we live in a world where generally, we aren’t.

Staying on top of stress requires constant attention and management practices, because while we might not be in physical danger very often, we’re nonetheless under the most stress in human history. Just take a look at Julie Ray’s 2022 article on Gallup’s Negative Experience Index, called ‘World Unhappier, More Stressed Out than Ever’!

Stress can cloud your judgement.

Stress prevents you being able to truly listen, to receive messages from a state of surrender where you can hear whatever is being said.

Stress is a very real threat to your customer service. As a business leader, one of the new indicators underpinning your customer service performance is how well your staff handle stress. 

I’ve always believed that customer service is not a question of capability or whether people care, but rather of how well people manage themselves under pressure and in different scenarios – how they self-regulate.

Many of your staff are serving customers who are stressed out. They have financial pressures, home life issues and broken families. They may feel disconnected from society.  Your teams need to be able to manage their own stress to serve these stressed-out customers and put them at ease with service solutions.

So, one of the solutions to improved service for business is to improve your people’s stress management capability. It’s a critical self-mastery skill for this era of service.