Beyond Resilience Ver 3.0
Protecting Contact Centre Agents from Customer Abuse
Key Insights from the Callbi Thought Leadership Webinar
Held on 22nd July 2026
There are occasions when a webinar ends and everyone simply logs off, satisfied that they have spent an hour learning something new. Then there are discussions that continue long after the meeting has ended because they raise questions that every leader recognises, yet few have taken the time to explore them properly.
This was one of those conversations.
Hosted by Callbi Interaction Intelligence, the webinar brought together three respected leaders from across South Africa’s customer experience and BPO sectors to discuss an issue that has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Customer abuse directed at frontline contact centre agents is not new, but it is becoming more visible, more frequent, and, perhaps most importantly, more openly discussed.
The webinar was moderated by Rod Jones, an independent Board Advisor, Industry Strategist and Executive Mentor with more than four decades’ experience working with contact centres, BPO organisations and customer experience leaders throughout Southern Africa. Opening the discussion, Rod reflected on how dramatically the industry has evolved over that time. Technology has transformed almost every aspect of customer engagement. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organisations analyse conversations and support decision-making. Customer expectations continue to rise. Yet despite these extraordinary advances, one element of the profession has remained remarkably constant. Every customer interaction still depends on another human being calmly answering the telephone, responding to a digital enquiry or patiently helping a frustrated customer find a solution.
That observation led to the first question posed to the panel.
Have we become so focused on improving customer experience that we have unintentionally overlooked the experience of the people delivering it?
It proved to be the thread that ran through the entire discussion.
Joining the conversation were Cheryl Paarwater, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Call-Lab BPO and Managing Director of Enerlytics; Rudi Jansen, Chief People Officer at Trilogy BPO; and Shayne Janks Nicolas, Chief Operating Officer at Digital Customer Experience (DCX). Although each brought a different professional perspective to the discussion, there was an immediate sense that they were examining different facets of the same challenge rather than debating opposing viewpoints.
Rod invited the panel to begin by considering a distinction that is often overlooked. Every contact centre agent expects to handle frustrated customers. Delayed deliveries, billing disputes, system failures and service interruptions inevitably lead to emotional conversations. Managing those situations professionally has always been part of the role. The real question, however, is where legitimate frustration ends and unacceptable behaviour begins.
That simple distinction immediately changed the tone of the discussion.
Rather than discussing difficult customers in general, the conversation shifted to the growing incidence of personal insults, intimidation, profanity and sustained verbal abuse directed at frontline employees. The panel agreed that organisations have become highly skilled at measuring customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and service quality, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to understanding the cumulative emotional impact of repeated abusive interactions on the people handling them every day.
One of the most interesting observations came early in the discussion. Contact centre agents are, almost by definition, remarkably resilient. They are trained to remain calm, demonstrate empathy and de-escalate conflict, often within minutes of answering a call. Their professionalism can make it seem as though difficult interactions have little lasting impact. In reality, the emotional effect is often simply masked by years of experience and a determination to continue doing the job well.
At this point, Rod challenged the panel with another question that resonated strongly throughout the webinar.
If repeated verbal abuse were to occur regularly in almost any other workplace, organisations would almost certainly intervene. Why should contact centres be expected to accept it as simply part of the job?
It was a question that shifted the discussion from operational management to leadership.
Rather than asking how agents could become more resilient, the conversation began by exploring how organisations themselves should respond. That subtle shift in perspective would shape everything that followed and lay the foundation for a thoughtful discussion about leadership, organisational culture, technology and the responsibility every employer has to protect the wellbeing of the people who represent their brand every day.
Leadership Begins with Looking After Your People
Rod’s opening questions naturally steered the discussion towards leadership rather than operations. If customer abuse is increasingly common for contact centre agents, whose responsibility is it to respond? Is it simply part of the working environment, or does it demand a different approach from those leading customer experience teams?
Rudi Jansen was the first to tackle that challenge. Drawing on his experience as Chief People Officer at Trilogy BPO, he urged the audience to look beyond the immediate customer interaction and consider the broader organisational culture. In his view, protecting employee wellbeing is not merely a Human Resources initiative or an employee wellness programme. It is one of the defining responsibilities of good leadership.
Throughout the discussion, Rudi returned to a simple yet powerful principle. Organisations achieve their best commercial outcomes when their people feel respected, supported and psychologically safe. These objectives are not in conflict with one another. On the contrary, they reinforce each other.
That perspective resonated strongly with the audience because it challenged a belief deeply embedded in many customer service environments. Contact centre agents are often recruited and trained to be resilient. They learn to remain calm under pressure, defuse conflict and continue serving customers professionally, regardless of the behaviour directed towards them. These are valuable skills and remain essential. The discussion, however, suggested that resilience should never become an excuse for organisations to tolerate behaviour that would be unacceptable in almost any other workplace.
Rod then invited the panel to reflect on a question that many operational leaders quietly wrestle with.
At what point does supporting the customer begin to conflict with supporting the employee?
The discussion that followed was refreshingly balanced. None of the panellists suggested lowering customer service standards or being less responsive to customers facing genuine problems. Customers are often frustrated for very good reasons, and contact centres exist to resolve those problems quickly and professionally.
The distinction, however, lies in recognising when frustration crosses the line into personal abuse.
Repeated profanity, intimidation, discriminatory language, or sustained verbal attacks should never be dismissed as mere occupational hazards. They carry consequences that are often invisible to performance dashboards but are very real for the people answering those calls. Emotional fatigue develops gradually. Confidence begins to erode. Experienced agents may continue to meet every operational target while privately carrying the cumulative impact of hundreds of difficult interactions.
One of the observations from the discussion was that contact centres have become exceptionally good at measuring operational performance. Organisations can report on service levels, quality scores, average handling time, compliance, productivity and customer satisfaction with remarkable precision. Yet those same reports often reveal very little about the emotional wellbeing of the people who produce those results.
As Rod observed during the discussion, perhaps the industry has become highly effective at measuring what people do, while paying far less attention to how they are coping.
That thought provided a natural bridge to Cheryl Paarwater’s contribution. While Rudi focused on leadership and organisational culture, Cheryl explored how advances in technology are beginning to give organisations a new understanding of what actually happens during customer interactions. The question was no longer whether abusive behaviour exists. Increasingly, organisations can identify it, measure it and, most importantly, respond to it far more proactively than ever before.
Technology Can Reveal What We Could Never See Before
As the discussion shifted from leadership to technology, Rod invited Cheryl Paarwater to reflect on how the industry has changed over the past decade. Having led one of South Africa’s most respected BPO organisations while working closely with technology that analyses customer interactions at scale, Cheryl is uniquely positioned. She understands both the operational realities of running a contact centre and the opportunities that modern customer interaction intelligence now offers.
Her central message was both practical and optimistic.
For years, organisations have known that customer abuse exists, yet they have had very little objective information about its scale or impact. Quality assurance programmes typically review only a small sample of customer interactions, often focusing on compliance, process adherence and customer service standards. While those reviews remain valuable, they rarely provide an accurate picture of what employees are experiencing across thousands of conversations each month.
Today, that picture is changing rapidly.
Advances in speech analytics, interaction intelligence and artificial intelligence now enable organisations to analyse virtually every customer interaction, rather than relying on small samples. More importantly, these technologies can identify recurring patterns that would previously have gone unnoticed. Repeated profanity, aggressive language, emotional escalation and other indicators of abusive behaviour can now be detected automatically, providing leaders with a level of visibility that simply did not exist only a few years ago.
Cheryl was careful to point out that technology should never be viewed as a solution in its own right. Rather, it provides leaders with better information on which to make better decisions.
That distinction is important.
Technology does not demonstrate empathy, support an employee after a particularly difficult interaction or create a healthy organisational culture. Those remain leadership responsibilities. What technology can do is remove much of the guesswork. Instead of relying solely on anecdotal evidence or waiting until an employee reaches breaking point, organisations can begin identifying patterns much earlier and intervene before the cumulative effects of customer abuse begin affecting wellbeing, engagement or performance.
Rod challenged the panel to consider another question.
If organisations can now identify customers who repeatedly abuse frontline employees, how should that information be used?
The discussion recognised that there is no single answer. Every organisation will have its own policies and commercial realities. Nevertheless, the panel agreed that information creates opportunity. Once organisations understand what is happening across every customer interaction, they are far better placed to support their people, improve coaching, review customer policies, and make informed leadership decisions based on evidence rather than assumption.
The conversation then broadened beyond abusive interactions to the wider role that customer interaction intelligence can play in developing stronger organisations.
The same technologies that identify difficult customer behaviour can also recognise outstanding examples of empathy, resilience and professionalism. They can highlight coaching opportunities, identify emerging training needs and uncover best practice that might otherwise remain hidden. In other words, interaction intelligence should not simply be viewed as a mechanism for identifying problems. It should become a tool for recognising excellence and helping people become even better at what they do.
One observation from Cheryl particularly resonated with the audience. Every customer conversation contains valuable insight. Traditionally, organisations have focused almost exclusively on what those conversations reveal about customers. Increasingly, however, they also reveal important insights about the organisation itself. They expose weaknesses in business processes, highlight recurring customer frustrations and provide early warning of operational issues. At the same time, they reveal how employees are coping, where additional support may be required and which leaders are creating high-performing, engaged teams.
Rod observed that perhaps the industry’s greatest opportunity is no longer simply to become more customer-centric, but to become more conversation-centric. Every interaction tells two stories at once. One is the customer’s experience. The other is the employee’s experience. Organisations that learn from both will be far better placed to improve customer satisfaction while creating healthier, more resilient workplaces.
As the discussion drew towards its conclusion, Shayne Janks Nicolas built naturally on that point. Technology, she suggested, undoubtedly enables better decisions, but exceptional customer experience has always depended on people. That simple observation became the focus of the webinar’s closing discussion.
Great Customer Experience Begins Behind the Headset
As the webinar approached its conclusion, Rod invited Shayne Janks Nicolas to reflect on what he had heard from both Rudi Jansen and Cheryl Paarwater. By this stage, an interesting pattern had begun to emerge. Although the discussion had explored leadership, organisational culture and technology from different perspectives, each conversation kept returning to the same point—the people sitting behind the headset.
Shayne’s contribution brought the discussion firmly back to operational reality.
From her perspective as Chief Operating Officer of Digital Customer Experience (DCX), there is no contradiction between meeting demanding commercial objectives and creating an environment where people genuinely want to come to work every day. In fact, the two are inseparable. Organisations that consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences almost always share one thing in common. They have leaders who understand that engaged employees create engaged customers.
That observation resonated with many attendees at the webinar because it reflected a reality experienced across the industry every day.
Customers do not build relationships with technology. They build relationships with people.
Technology undoubtedly enables faster service, better information and greater efficiency, but it is still the judgement, empathy, patience and professionalism of the individual handling the interaction that ultimately determine how the customer remembers the experience.
Throughout the discussion, Shayne repeatedly returned to the importance of culture.
Culture is often discussed as though it were an abstract concept or a statement on an office wall. In reality, culture is experienced through hundreds of everyday leadership decisions. It is reflected in how supervisors coach their teams, how managers respond to difficult customer interactions, and whether employees genuinely believe their organisation values them as people rather than simply as resources.
Rod posed one final question to the panel.
If we want customers to feel respected, shouldn’t our employees experience the same respect every day they come to work?
It was perhaps the simplest question of the morning, yet it produced one of the strongest points of agreement.
The panel acknowledged that contact centres operate in highly demanding commercial environments. Performance targets must be met. Service levels must be maintained. Customers rightly expect fast, professional service. None of those realities are changing.
What can change, however, is the way organisations support the people responsible for delivering those outcomes.
Several practical examples emerged during the discussion. Improved coaching following particularly difficult calls. More meaningful conversations between supervisors and their teams. Greater use of interaction intelligence to identify employees who may need additional support. Stronger recognition of individuals who consistently demonstrate resilience, empathy and professionalism under pressure. None of these initiatives require organisations to lower customer service standards. If anything, they strengthen them.
An interesting observation also emerged regarding leadership visibility.
In many organisations, senior executives rarely experience first-hand the emotional intensity of the conversations in their contact centres every day. They see the reports, the dashboards and the performance metrics, but not necessarily the cumulative effect of handling distressed, frustrated or abusive customers hour after hour.
Perhaps one of the greatest opportunities for leadership is simply to spend more time understanding reality.
The conversation naturally broadened beyond customer abuse itself. The panel agreed that creating healthier workplaces is not simply about responding when something goes wrong. It is equally about creating environments where employees feel trusted, listened to and supported long before problems arise. When people believe their organisation genuinely cares about their wellbeing, they are more likely to remain engaged, more willing to develop new skills and better equipped to deliver consistently positive customer experiences.
As Rod reflected during the closing moments of the discussion, perhaps the customer experience profession is at an important turning point. For many years, organisations have invested heavily in understanding the customer journey. Increasingly, progressive organisations recognise that they also need to understand the employee journey with the same level of commitment.
The two journeys are not separate.
They intersect in every customer conversation.
That thought provided a fitting conclusion to the panel discussion and led naturally into Rod’s closing reflections on what the conversation might mean for the future of South Africa’s customer experience and BPO industry.
Closing Reflections from the Moderator
By Rod Jones
As I reflected on the discussion after the webinar, I realised that we had spent surprisingly little time discussing technology itself.
Yes, we explored the exciting advances in customer interaction intelligence. We discussed the growing role of artificial intelligence and speech analytics, and the ability to analyse every customer conversation rather than relying on small samples. These innovations are undoubtedly changing our industry, and they will continue to do so at an extraordinary pace.
Yet that wasn’t the real story. The real story was leadership.
Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of contact centres across Southern Africa. I have witnessed remarkable technological change, significant shifts in customer expectations and substantial growth in our BPO industry. South Africa has earned a well-deserved international reputation for delivering exceptional customer service, supported by talented people, strong operational leadership and the ability to connect with customers from around the world.
But that reputation has been built on something far more important than technology.
It has been built on people.
Every day, thousands of contact centre agents field calls from customers they have never met and will likely never speak to again. They solve problems, calm frustrated callers, repair damaged relationships and represent their organisations with professionalism and patience. Most of those conversations end positively. Some do not.
The reality is that customer abuse is unlikely ever to disappear completely.
People become frustrated. Systems fail. Mistakes happen. Emotions sometimes get the better of us. That is part of human nature.
The challenge for leaders is not to eliminate difficult conversations.
The challenge is to ensure that the people handling those conversations never feel they are handling them alone.
One of the strongest messages to emerge from our panel was that supporting employee wellbeing is not an alternative to delivering excellent customer experience—it is one of its essential foundations.
If organisations genuinely want to improve customer loyalty, increase employee engagement and build sustainable high-performance cultures, they must begin by recognising a simple truth.
The employee experience and the customer experience are inseparable.
One cannot flourish for long without the other.
That is where I believe customer interaction intelligence offers such exciting possibilities. For many years, organisations have analysed conversations primarily to understand customers. Today, those same conversations can also help us understand our people.
We can identify where coaching is needed. We can recognise exceptional resilience and professionalism. We can detect patterns of customer abuse before they become hidden organisational problems.
Most importantly, we can make better leadership decisions based on evidence rather than assumption.
That, in my view, represents one of the most significant opportunities currently facing our industry.
As South Africa continues to strengthen its position as one of the world’s leading destinations for customer experience and business process outsourcing, our competitive advantage will never depend solely on cost, technology or infrastructure.
It will continue to depend on the quality of our people.
Protecting those people, supporting them and equipping them to succeed is not simply the right thing to do. It is also smart business.
I would like to thank Cheryl Paarwater, Rudi Jansen and Shayne Janks Nicolas for sharing their insights so openly and thoughtfully. Their willingness to discuss this important subject reflects the maturity of an industry increasingly prepared to ask difficult questions and, more importantly, to work together to find practical solutions.
Finally, my thanks go to everyone who joined us for the webinar.
If the discussion encourages even a few organisations to look at how they support their frontline teams in a different way, then the conversation has already achieved something worthwhile.
After all, every memorable customer experience begins with an employee who feels respected, valued and supported.
Perhaps that is the most important insight of all.
