How do I distance myself from work stress

[Yesnomaybeok]

I work in a large organisation where I hold the relationship with a proportion of our customers directly. They contact me if they have any challenges or questions. It is up to me to keep them happy.

Every now and again, the problems they experience have to be escalated to our IT team, data team or another team. The process for this takes far too long. It can take up to 2 weeks to get an answer. In the meantime, I'm the one who gets bombarded with questions by the client and gets the frustration that the client is feeling, basically getting it in the neck. I am powerless to help when this happens and our process does not allow me to chase, complain about things or make things faster. To make it harder, I still have to keep this relationship with the client which is really hard under these circumstances. How do I maintain my stress levels in these situations. It maybe happens 5-6 times a month so I never 100% feel settled. I've raised it with my manager, who agrees but is also powerless to change it.

Well there’s a systems failure there - which you need to raise with your bosses boss, or their boss.

It will be a long process to get things properly sped up, but the teams you are referring to ought to be able to provide an update with where they are every four days. Can you raise this as a formal starting point.

Are you also clear with clients it’s going to be a 2 week wait at the start?

Ha - sorry I see you are asking about stress more than process, although I do think working to improve the process will improve your stress.

I would go to HR to talk about how stressful this is as part of your efforts to improve it, as it helps to make as much noise as possible. Every time a client gets cross notify HR and your boss.

Other than that, be clear with the client how long it will take from the start, update them every 4 days - they will likely be happier if they aren’t chasing you, even if you don’t have anything much to say.

There is no way I will be able to influence the policy. I'm minion level and they don't listen. I can't even tell them how long it will take. It can be two days but I've known issues take 2 months so I never want to say how long it will be. Most are sorted within 2 weeks but this is way too long so if I said this from the offset the clients would be angry and would potentially leave us.

Ok, two things. This might be a stupid question, but have you tried letting the clients know that you’re waiting for a response from whichever team, and a rough timescale? Eg replying that you can’t answer their question, but have passed it on to xyz team and will get back to them as soon as there is an answer, but this could take up to 2 weeks etc etc. People generally get frustrated if there’s no clear timescale or if the communication is poor, so make sure you tackle those aspects.

Secondly, and this may or may not help you, but I find it helpful to remember that these minor day to day issues seem bad at the time, but in 6 months or a year or whatever I’m not even going to remember what the big deal was. If it’s not life or death then it probably doesn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things.

Get one of the clients to name and shame the company.

What, and get fired and be unable to get a reference and pay my bills?