5 Ways to Improve Call Center Management
While the majority of small businesses are sole proprietorships, a sizable minority of around 6 million small businesses operate as employers. Once your business makes that transition, there is a good chance that you’ll either run or outsource to a contact center.
Call centers let you do outbound calls to leads or take inbound calls to provide customer service to your existing customer base. Of course, the quality of that operation depends a lot on call center management.
If you run an in-house call center or provide call center services to other businesses, keep reading for five ways you improve call center management.
Improve Call Center Management
1. Define Quality Performance
Yes, there is an intangible, hard-to-quantify element to quality performance in a call center. Some employees simply excel at it, while others struggle.
Yet, something that many call centers overlook during training is providing a clear definition of what counts as quality performance or acceptable performance.
Employees can’t achieve standards if they don’t have some kind of measuring stick for them.
2. Optimize Your Scheduling
No schedule will function perfectly every single week. People get sick and call out. You need a body in their chair to make calls. At some point, you will have employees working overtime.
Even so, you should do your best to avoid letting people work overtime except in dire need. Ideally, none of your employees will ever work more than an eight-hour shift. Working long shifts noticeably degrades performance and may even help trigger illness.
3. Limit Stress Where You Can
Working in a call center puts a lot of stress on employees. In any given shift, they can find themselves getting yelled at by customers or hung up on by leads over and over.
It’s bad for morale. Do what you can to make the environment as soothing as possible. For example, you can put together a nice break room.
4. Leverage Technology
Technology keeps evolving faster than most people expect. You can’t keep your call center in a constant state of change management by switching up software every six months. You should, however, keep your eye out for solutions that can save time and money.
For example, you can see a solution here that let’s call center employees to make calls directly from a customer record. It’s a time saver.
5. Provide On-the-Spot Feedback
Employees in any business crave feedback. When you spot a call center employee doing something well or doing something right that most people don’t, provide them positive feedback right then. It helps reinforce the behavior and gives the employee a boost.
Call Center Management and You
Call center management has a profound effect not only on call center efficiency but also on call center staff. There is a lot you can do on the management front to keep things on track or even improve.
Provide clear definitions for what good performance means. Optimize scheduling and minimize stress where you can. Leverage new technology when it provides a clear benefit.
Give employees on-the-spot feedback, especially when they do well.
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