How To Manage Call Center Employees effectively

What makes a call center successful?

There is no exact approach for ensuring the success of a contact center. However, when the complete customer support team collaborates and uses the correct call center technology, there is no chance of going wrong. Let’s look at the two most important responsibilities in a company’s customer service department: contact center manager (or supervisor) and call center representative (agent).

What is the job of a call center supervisor?

Call center supervisors are in charge of overseeing the call center’s activities in order to meet the company’s customer service objectives. Their responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Managing, leading, and inspiring members of a team
• Supervising the hiring and onboarding processes
• Promoting agent engagement and retention, as well as assisting in the reduction of turnover rates
• Developing and sustaining a peaceful culture
• Goal-setting, usually with the top manager
• Identifying critical performance determinants that have an impact on goals
• Assigning obligations that are required to attain goals
• Speaking with disgruntled clients and devising satisfying answers
• Creating and analyzing performance reports for contact centers
• Identifying and resolving issues with call center efficiency
• Assisting in the optimization of call center procedures in order to increase efficiency

Because call center supervisors have a lot of things to do, it’s critical that you recruit the most qualified, well-rounded individual. The following are the most important talents to search for:

• Critical Thinking 
• Decision Making 
• Problem Solving 
• Inter-personal 
• Communication 
• Time Management

What exactly is a call center agent? 

A call center representative is in charge of managing a company’s inbound and outgoing client calls. They serve as the company’s front line, dealing with issues such as product complaints, payment difficulties, and support requests, among other things.

Customer service representatives, customer care representatives, telephone service attendants, and telesales agents are some other names for call center agents. You’ve definitely heard of the phrase contact center agent—on top of conventional phone calls; contact center employees manage emails, live chats, social media messages, and other digital engagements.

What do call center representatives do?

A call center agent’s primary responsibilities include answering and dialling client calls. Responding to enquiries, handling complaints, accepting orders, and troubleshooting difficulties are common responsibilities for those who answer incoming calls. Outgoing calls, on the other hand, are typically used to collect survey data, make appointments, and transmit promotional offers.

Here is a list of typical call center representative responsibilities:

• Professionally answering and/or initiating client calls
• Obtaining, recording, confirming, and updating client information and other data in order to manage discussions more effectively.
• Identifying and, if necessary, increasing priority concerns.
• Making notes on discussions
• Identifying possibilities to upsell or cross-sell if necessary
• Developing long-term customer partnerships
• achieving personal and team goals

How To Manage Call Center Employees effectively

We have almost talked about every important jargon or thing of a call center. Now, let’s get into the list of a few tips that can help you manage your call center employees effectively. 

Integrate Team Collaboration Tools

Tools for team communication are critical for managing call center as it helps to create a healthy collaborative environment in the office. 

One of the primary advantages of collaboration tools is that individuals with less expertise may obtain assistance from more experienced colleagues via instant messaging/chat (a typical feature of collaboration platforms) rather than needing to phone or email them. This fosters a stronger team dynamic and deeper relationships and eliminates the need to meet in person on a regular basis.

Chat features, scheduling, and allocation capabilities are common in project management applications, allowing agents to see what their colleagues are up to at any given moment. This makes them feel like they are a member of a group.

Provide Incentives To Agents In Order To Engage And Motivate Them

Gamification is becoming widely attractive and popular for managing call center employees since it is a motivating technique that offers workers concrete incentives as an incentive. (And, let’s be honest, it’s just plain entertaining!)

By incorporating points and awards into your workers’ daily activities, you may make work feel more like a game and offer them more incentive to achieve their best. You may offer them prospective incentives such as gift cards, paid time off, restaurant coupons, and gadgets. This will make managing remote contact center agents a little easier for you.

Employees have more reasons to push themselves and aspire higher than merely ticking off their job responsibilities. Gamification promotes healthy and fair competition among agents, and as they feel more valued, their loyalty to your firm grows.

Boost Productivity And Performance With QM Software 

Quality management (QM) software is essential for properly managing contact center employees.

QM software allows you to monitor the work of your agents and discover possible strengths and flaws. This is far easier than attempting to work backwards from mistakes or client complaints, allowing you to be more proactive in improving agent performance.

Using integrated messaging, you can provide real-time feedback to your agents and allow them to discuss improvement ideas with colleagues. With the correct tools in place, you can evaluate client interactions across all of your channels to identify areas that need improvement or need recognition.

Training may be improved by using focused training that includes quizzes and a variety of information. Your agents will receive the necessary support to sharpen their abilities and make them feel more involved.

Develop A Healthy Company Culture To Increase Engagement 

Company culture makes employees feel more linked to the company, their job, and the individual goals of the brand. A positive business culture also makes it easier to manage call center employees.

It is generally more difficult for workers to have a sense of belonging to a firm and a bigger objective. You must foster a feeling of community and make agents feel fully involved in the brand.

• What are the fundamental values?
• What emotions should customers have after engaging with agents?
• How does the company want its agents to portray both the company and themselves?

Unlike conventional brick-and-mortar workplaces, where building a positive culture is simpler in person, building a great culture among call center employees requires a bit more imagination. 

Ascertain that agents understand their role in the organization and their worth. Regular interactions and a reward scheme might make them feel valued by the company. This may have a significant impact on agents’ involvement with the firm, work happiness, and overall call center agent management.

Allow or Insist Customers Provide Feedback 

Building on client feedback is an important component of managing your call center executives. You may gather essential information on how your agents are functioning from a new viewpoint by offering consumers polls or surveys, either immediately after their engagement or a few days later.

Measuring the customer experience is critical since consumers’ perspectives and experiences will differ from yours. Customer feedback is very important when managing contact center agents since it determines how effective your representatives are.

Accept Agent Feedbacks 

Agent feedback is just as important as customer feedback when it comes to managing call center agents.

Allow your staff to express their feelings on the elements of their daily work that they enjoy and detest. Which portions of the procedure do they believe are taking longer or are more complicated than they should be? Do they want more instruction and encounters with you, or do they want to be more self-sufficient?

Listening to your team members will make them feel more appreciated and respected, which will improve their entire experience.

By figuring out better methods to manage call center agents, you can provide them more freedom while lowering your company’s costs. While the work model might provide challenges for contact center management at times, the correct digital technologies — such as video conferencing, collaboration tools, and WFM apps — can help to create a sustainable plan.

How To Manage Remote Call Center Agents

Well, the process of managing call center agents who are working remotely is not that much different. The process is almost the same as mentioned above. You just have to show extra supervision on remote call center agents. Apart from the points added above, we have mentioned a few extra points below that you should follow while managing remote call center agents:

Brings The Most Out Of Video Conferencing

Video conferencing technologies allow you to bring together all of your remote or distance agents at once and communicate face to face. It might be the closest they get to meet in person, and face-to-face contact will help them bond.

Video conferencing is perfect for teaching distant contact center agents more dynamically than emailing papers to agents. Reading through page after page of dry text can be tiresome. However, video conferencing allows for a more dynamic learning experience.

Hosting video training sessions allows agents to ask questions in real-time, assist one another in learning, and study visual aids to reinforce important topics.

How To Manage Productivity In Call Centers 

The points we have mentioned above are the ones that can help you to bring productivity to call centers. Apart from this thing, call center software is the one that can drastically improve the productivity of your call center and its employees. SanCCS by SAN Softwares is one of the best call center software solution that helps to manage your call center effectively and efficiently. 

There are a ton of advantages that SanCCS has to offer: 

• Automated Call Distribution
• Real-Time Analytics and Report
• Multilevel IVR
• Self Designable Web-Based CRM
• Seamless Integration
• Skill Based Routing
• Agent Performance MIS
• Unified Agent Desktop
• Click to call
• Thoughtful UI
• Omni Channel
• Customer service