Some research indicates that the more "emotional dissonance" an agent experiences, the more likely that agent is to experience emotional exhaustion.

Although I know how tiring emotional labor can be, I also know it can also be very rewarding. I think this is an incredibly important message for our agents.

One suggestion is to use "heroic" stories to emotionally reward not only those agents who had the experience but also all those who hear it. We get so busy that we often forget to gather and relate those wonderful human-interest details that keep individuals going day after day.

In one of the Response Design facilitate training sessions, we asked participants to write what qualified them to be a customer service hero. We asked them to describe one (or several) situations during which they felt they really helped someone. The event did not have to be a spectacular crisis. Instead, we wanted them to focus on the outcome of the interaction - did both the agent and the customer feel like they had accomplished good. The stories we got were miraculous. Not because they were Pulitzer material or that the events were indeed "heroic." No, it was the effect the recounting had on both the hero and his audience. Both caught the excitement of investing in emotional labor. The other interesting conclusion of the group was that "emotional labor" is really not "labor" at all. It was seen as a higher commitment or "emotional giving."