Metrics are killing me with live chat job...

So I work as a live customer service chat agent. At first I thought I had hit the jackpot of all jobs. Not having to talk to customers verbally and getting yelled at over the phone. What I did not know is the metrics and expectations for my role are very, very strict and it causing me lots of stress because I am at risk of potentially losing my job and being placed on a PIP.

The KPIs want every live chat to be 7 minutes or less. That may look like a long time on paper, but when a customer is a slow typer or they keep going in circles or if they have a complicated issue, it is extremely difficult to make that chat 7 minutes and under. A lot of customers chat in with complicated issues that take longer to resolve.

Then of course there is the quality metric. A lot of agents find it impossible to keep both straight. You either rush through chats and keep the chats under the 7 minutes and see quality tank, or you actually help the customer and take time to fully resolve their issue and score high on quality but tank the handle time.

We also take more than one chat at a time so this can get super stressful especially when it gets busy and it's back to back multiple chats at a time. After work some days I feel like my head is spinning.

I just feel a loss of morale because management knows how stressed we are, and it just feels like they don't do anything or care. They said they were looking into raising the chat handle time metric in response to the increased volume we have had, but they decided to not do it for some reason.

I wish I could go back to my phone based job. At least I could just focus on one customer contact at a time. I just needed to vent.