What Are The Five Qualities Of A Good Contact Center Manager?

If a company wants to outsource its call center services in order to save costs and improve performance, it is important to analyze the management structure of the provider’s contact center: from the top manager to the supervisors who have daily and direct contact with the agents.

Most contact center service providers often follow a business model that requires supervision over a minimum number of agents, usually at least 20 for the employer to be high performing and profitable. Those in supervisory functions include trainers who participate in the incorporation process and team leaders who offer continuous training to agents.

Depending on the type of services provided by the call center, the proportion between supervisors and agents could vary widely. Industry studies show that high-performance call centers have between 8 and 15 agents per team leader.

What Are The Five Qualities Of A Good Contact Center Manager?

1) Prepared To Train

Agents who are promoted to Contact Center Manager are usually recognized for their excellent customer service skills, problem solving and knowledge of call center processes. Team leaders need specialized training in the art of agent coaching in the following areas: one-to-one communication skills, ability to develop performance improvement plans for agents, and provide constructive feedback and criticism in a consistent and effective manner.

2) Ability To Motivate

A Contact Center Manager understands the nature of the call center’s work and knows how and when agents feel motivated. High-performance team leaders become creative when it comes to stimulating agents, such as encouraging them to pursue a certain professional career with the organization, identifying and addressing the first signs of exhaustion by changing the schedule or assigning a job more adjusted to their interests and your skill set.

3) Analytical Experience

Effective Contact Center Managers use measurable standards and objectives to monitor agent performance. Call center KPIs, such as average queue times for users, response speed, attention span, and work duration after the call, offer team leaders a wealth of information to identify problems of performance. Supervisors take advantage of current contact center management software platforms, which present KPI in a control panel format, which facilitates the identification of trends and the planning of improvement plans.

4) Ability To Focus And Prioritize

Call volumes change rapidly for various reasons, from special promotions launched by the company, holiday periods and seasonal demand, to unexpected events that cause service interruptions. Contact Center Managers have to take on the responsibilities of multiple tasks and projects. Team leaders with better performance can prioritize urgent projects, while maintaining agent performance. Once again, the leader-agent relationship becomes important here. Therefore, call center supervisors should strive to maintain the best relationship for performance management.

5) Capacity For Empathy And Collaboration

Building a strong relationship between the Contact Center Manager and the team begins by showing that you care about their performance and strives to help them excel and advance as agents. Good team leaders want to share the path to success by clearly explaining the metrics of the organization’s objectives and by providing ongoing advice so that agents understand how to achieve them.