The alarm goes off – 6:30am. He does not want to get out of bed – far from it. The air beyond the duvet is freezing. He turns to look at his wife, still sound asleep despite the alarm – and envies her more than it’s possible to express. He’d give anything to be able to sleep a bit more… but he can’t. He’s got to get moving.

Shower, teeth brushed, cup of coffee – wrap up warm for the walk to the bus stop – not that it helps, the cold seeps through to the bones. John walks down the street in the darkness, staring at the pavement as he goes. Having to get a bus at 7:30am because of a reduced timetable – arriving at work hours before he needs to. A bus because they only have one car and his wife needs it for work – exhausted before the sun comes up.

The shuddering bus (which had splashed him on arrival – leg still wet) makes it impossible for John to even attempt a little shut-eye before it arrives at the cardboard-box-like building he works at. He looks around at the other passengers – coughing and sneezing – and at the dirty railings and upholstery. All he can do is stare out the window at the darkness, realising from time to time that he’s actually staring at his own worn-out reflection.

According to TUC.org, commuters are losing out on 4 hours a week of personal time, and time with their loved ones – this loss of time can impact on employees negatively, leading to burnout and stress. This not only has a detrimental impact on the employee but the employer too: stressed and burned-out employees are not anywhere near as productive as they could be. Reducing the commute via hybrid working or work-from-home is a win-win for everyone involved.

“Just get it sorted!” the customer screams down the phone. John glances at the time. 10:00 am. He thought it would have been later than this, but it isn’t. It’s never the time he thinks it is. Time is crawling, dragging, lurching from milestone to milestone in the day. This customer shouldn’t even have gotten through to him – the problem wasn’t something he could deal with anyway. And now when he tries to escalate, there aren’t any managers available. But the customer won’t understand this – and why should they? Two unhappy people, powerless to change the situation they’re locked in. One is angry because they can’t get the service they expect, the other is emotionally spent at being spoken to like trash for days, weeks, months and years.

The tiredness, the stress, the needless commute, the systems that don’t work together properly, the lack of easy communication – it all forms into a perfect storm, thinks John, as the call ends. He and his colleagues talk about it sometimes – on breaks, between calls – how things could be done better.

There’s no doubt that the customer experience is improved by unified communications. One way to measure the impact of this is to look at the widespread adoption of CCaaS – the Contact Centre as a Solution global market is set to go through further stratospheric growth: from $4.7bn in 2022 to $15.1bn in 2029. 

This clearly shows that businesses understand the critical nature of providing their staff with the tools to do the job properly – leading to happier customers, better outcomes, and secure business reputations.

Lunchtime. John plays with his meagre pickings – hastily thrown together. A drab sandwich. A bit of fruit. Nondescript, metallic-tasting coffee. He misses his kids. He thinks about how he won’t be able to pick them up from school when they’re older – he’ll be stuck on the shaky bus, staring at his shoes.

He sees his whole life, all of a sudden – rising stress, emotional starvation – missing out on so many important moments with his kids. Never home in time for their bedtime. Sinking so much of the time he’ll never get back into a place he doesn’t care about, speaking to people he doesn’t know about things he can’t fix. Never armed with the tools to even attempt to feel like he’s doing a decent job – a punching bag for strangers, a target for blame for a system that set him up to fail. And then beyond all that, feeling like a failure when the working day is done – not present in his own life –

John jolts awake.

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