Training for Managers
In today's competitive customer support industry, call centres must establish themselves as world-class service providers. And to do this, it is the manager who must be able to set the standard.
Yet, running a call centre can be an extremely complex and challenging process. Thoroughly understanding the core technologies that drive the call centre is critical to success.
In numerous surveys carried out over recent years, call centre analysts have found that a very large percentage of supervisors in call centres have moved into their positions from the frontline. Call centre agents today, managers tomorrow.
The common transition of so many has, of course, partly been a symptom of the growth in the industry. If individual call centres had waited until they could find a qualified and experienced manager, they would have been waiting a long time and the industry today would be a very different, and much smaller, place.
It seems that most new supervisors receive training on general supervisory skills. And that’s good, as far as it goes. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that only a small percentage, maybe around 20 percent, receive additional advanced call-centre operational training before they are entrenched in the management role.
Running a successful call centre operation is like running any business. The leader of the business must have skills in strategic planning, organisational design, financial management and decision-making, business process improvement, risk management, and more. Most of this is general management.
But, in addition, there is much today’s call centre executive needs to know about staff planning and management, workplace design, and acquiring and making the most of call centre tools and technologies, all of which is very call centre specific.
There is no doubt that there is particular call centre knowledge, over and above general management knowledge, that call centre managers need to be familiar with. For a call centre to have any reasonable level of efficiency, the manager needs to be able to:
- Create a planning culture
- Meet service levels consistently
- Forecast the workload with accuracy
- Develop accurate schedules
- Manage the queue in real-time
- Communicate unique call centre dynamics
- Set the right performance objectives
- Improve quality and efficiency
- Win the support and recognition of top management.
Excellent call centre managers plan and manage call centre resources on a daily basis. This can be a delicate juggling act and it is not the sort of specific skill that general management courses cover.
Equally, many call centre managers lead a facility that has to handle a great variety of customer contacts and the various groups of agents need to be managed differently. Agents on relationship management will normally have quite different goals from those who are focused on acquisition.
The training for managers in call centres also has to enable them to effectively use reports and measurements, and know how to establish and meet relevant performance objectives, as well as win top management's support. These are all elements of the job, they are all important and they all need to be learnt.
Running a successful call centre operation means managing by the numbers, and perhaps the most important number of all is the number of resources in place to respond to customer contacts. Since over two-thirds of call centre operating costs are related to personnel, getting the "just right" number of staff in place is critical in terms of both service and cost.
Apart from the invaluable learning on the job that always takes place, new managers need to go through a step-by-step process of forecasting workload, calculating staff, creating schedules, tracking daily performance, and generally managing by the numbers.