Top 8 Ways to produce positive results by Call Center Managers

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How Call Center Managers Produced Positive
Results in Top 8 Ways
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Introduction

• Call centers face pressure from both company and
  customer to maximize their outputs and provide
  top level performance.
• On the one hand, there is the ever-increasing
  expectation of the customer and on the other, the
  competitive market keeps every company on their
  toes and pushes them to provide the most
  comprehensive quality of customer service they
  can possibly provide.
• Caught in the cross-hairs of this explosive
  market, managing a call center can be a pretty
  arduous task.
• As a manager, one has to not only face up to the
  rising expectations of outsiders from the
  company, but also meet the expectations of the
  employees who work for the company to ensure a
  sustained positive work environment.

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• Even with the help of call center software, it
  can be a difficult sometimes to set up metrics of
  evaluation that reflect performance directly, yet
  set targets that are achievable by the employees
  and keep them motivated to work even harder.
• A manager at a call center has to deal with
  pressure situations almost every single day.
  These situations could be internal mishaps like
  employees feeling dissatisfied, higher turnover
  rates, pressure from the parent company about
  performance issues, etc.
• They could also be related to interactions with
  customers, dealing with growing expectations,
  having to control damage after a PR stunt gone
  wrong, and the likes.
• All of this is experienced while working with a
  strict budget, having to cut costs wherever
  possible yet ensuring that performance levels do
  not drop.

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• If we can keep our competitors focused on us
  while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately
  we will turn out all right, says Jeff Bezos, CEO
  of digital giant Amazon.
• The most important part of a managers job is to
  ensure that his employees are not blindsided by
  distractions in the form of external changes, and
  stick to the work plan that they have been given.
  
• Once that can be ensured, competition can be
  dealt with by the upper rungs of management
  itself.
• Keeping in mind the stressful work conditions
  that call centers operate in, here is a list of
  the 7 biggest challenges faced by call center
  managers today.

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Agent recruitment.

• Hiring can be a very subjective area for a call
  center. In all other industry positions, there is
  a very clear demarcation of the skills necessary
  to excel in that job.
• However, for a call center agent, the right
  skills depend on the client being served and
  their priorities.
• Because this is variable, it becomes difficult to
  determine which candidate would be the greatest
  prospect for that call center a year down the
  road, or at any point in the future while he is
  handling clients.
• Finding quality agents can be hard through just a
  round or two or interviews, but the importance of
  hiring quality candidates is felt in its direct
  influence on the state of the companys business.

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Agent retention

• Attrition rates are arguable the biggest worry to
  plague the call center industry.
• Call centers see a very high turnover an
  average of about 29 in developed nations which
  rises to an overwhelming 55 to 60 in developing
  countries.
• The associated costs with an agent leaving are
  huge, and when half your agents are expected to
  leave every year, the entire amount spent on
  their training and grooming goes to waste for the
  company.
• Managers also waste their time and effort
  training these agents who leave the company after
  a year.
• The only viable antidote to high attrition is
  motivating your employees to stay loyal to your
  company, but even that is very difficult given
  the working conditions of call centers.

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Increasing customer expectations

• Online service provisions and the presence of
  social media have all contributed to a huge
  increase in the expectations of a customer from a
  company.
• Customers today expect the best of service
  provided in a personalized manner all the time,
  which may not be practically possible for the
  company to provide.
• Unrealistic expectations cause a crack in the
  relationship between consumer and company, and
  this impacts the sales negatively because
  customers are then willing to experiment with
  other competitors in the market.

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Backlash over social media

• Social media can be a very nervous point for call
  center managers.
• In reality, it is simply impossible to please
  everyone, which means there will always be a
  fraction of customers who are not satisfied with
  the level of customer service that is being
  provided.
• The problem today is that these customers vent
  their frustrations on Twitter and Facebook, from
  where the negative words about the company can
  spread like wildfire, impacting the brands image
  and affecting the trust it has established in the
  market. This would lead to a reduction in sales
  for the company.

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Budgetary constraints

• Having to deliver quality performances within a
  very strict budget is probably the biggest
  challenge that managers face while running the
  call centers.
• Monetary allocations towards customer service
  development are peanuts compared to the amounts
  spent on research, prototype building, testing
  and deployment, etc.
• Even the amount that does come in for customer
  service is majorly spent in outbound
  telemarketing campaigns, leaving very little room
  for managers to improvise in other scenarios.

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Optimizing the performance of the call center

• Accurate projections of requirement are crucial
  to the success of a call center.
• Understaffing and overstaffing are both
  potentially dangerous ploys for the company.
• This makes it important for the managers to
  formulate a model which can predict requirements
  of staff, skills and call volumes over a future
  period of time.
• Such models are developmental all over the world,
  but there can be inaccuracies in these reports,
  which pose a big challenge for managers of these,
  call centers.

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Making correct use of technology

• Even the best call center software requires
  trained professionals who know how to use it, for
  the best results to be obtained.
• Technology is moving so fast that call center
  managers struggle to stay on par with the latest
  tech and as a result lose out on opportunities
  that they could have harnessed to their benefit.
• There is also a conundrum where no business wants
  to fall behind their competitors because of the
  latest technology, yet businesses do not want to
  splash their cash for every new technology that
  is introduced in the market, simply because such
  introduction is so frequent.
• Maintaining a balance between getting the most
  efficient results out of the existing tech, and
  knowing when to invest in the latest tools that
  can open new pathways, is one of the most
  significant challenges of a modern call center
  manager.

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Determining metrics for evaluation

• Employees need to set targets so that their
  performance can be reviewed. In a call center,
  however, mere numbers do not make up the entire
  story.
• There are direct interactions with clients where
  the quality of conversation is far more important
  than how long an agent has been on the phone with
  them, for example, the determination of such
  quality-centric metrics is a challenge for
  managers because these are unique to a call
  center and have a direct bearing on the quality
  of final output.

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