The ongoing management challenge

As corporate call centres handle increasingly complex transactions and provide other departments with vital customer information, managers must be equipped to combine specialised call centre knowledge with sound management practices.

Of course, this is just one of the challenges of being a call centre manager.

Probably there are very few management jobs that are so diverse and demanding in so many skills, as that of the call centre manager. Yet, despite the demands of the role, not too many call centre managers do a formal course before they are in the job. In most cases, it’s a matter of learning as you go.

So there may not be that much formal training, but call centre professionals continue to grow in stature as the call centre’s value contribution is heightened and better understood within organisations.

In the typical call centre, the manager and his or her team are confronted with a number of considerable challenges:

• Potentially wide range of customer enquiries.
• Legal accountability for information provided to customers.
• The expectations from customers for 'instant' answers to questions.
• High stress work environment for call centre operators.
• High staff turnover.
• Large and complex body of knowledge to be learned by new staff.
• Constant pressure to reduce call handling times.

To be an excellent manager, while it is obviously essential to confront this list head on, it is also essential to figure out how the business purpose of the call centre, and the personal purpose of the manager, can work in the same direction.

As manager, you may well find that the call centre has several purposes, but you need to make sure that you get the overall purpose clear and then ensure the other purposes align with that one and enhance it.

One of the key management assumptions in call centres is that people can be held accountable for their performance.

Call centre workers are appraised on the amount of work they do - how many calls they take and how long they take on calls.

In fact, experienced managers are acutely aware that the performance of Customer Service Representatives is governed by many things that are beyond their control. The variables include elements such as the nature of calls, the availability of information, the behaviour of other parts of the organisation and so on. To hold the worker accountable in such circumstances causes stress.

In many cases, call centre workers believe, as their managers do, that they can be held accountable for performance despite these variables that are beyond their control. Because of the stress created, it is at this point that some people become deceptive.

If their performance is being judged by things beyond their control, call centre workers soon recognise that as unfair. They look at options for getting it right. And that can include cheating.

Peoples' ingenuity is engaged in surviving rather than improving performance. It is a tragic waste of human talent. The human costs of demoralisation are incalculable. The obvious costs are recruitment and training, as these conditions encourage high turnover. But the real costs are higher - poor service and high costs are associated with customer dissatisfaction and staff dissatisfaction.

In this environment, very often the call centre manager sees his or her job as setting and monitoring productivity, procedures and work standards.

It is an uncritically inherited assumption of traditional management thinking, that people are the primary cause of poor performance rather than the system in which they work. As a consequence, management becomes concerned with managing people's productivity. Paradoxically, very often managing productivity undermines productivity.

Based on their resource plans, managers set their service agents work standards and targets. It is a rational idea. In reality, however, the performance of any one individual will be subject to variation and the extent of that variation must be established before any action can be contemplated, otherwise managers can make the situation worse.

Managers (and service agents) need to know whether variation in performance is attributable to agents or the system. Current approaches to people management in call centres can sometimes ignore this important question.