7 Things to Avoid if You Want to Be an Effective Call Centre Manager

Effective management is essential for a successful call centre. A great manager must lead by example, providing support for agents while managing multiple processes and workflows.

The manager connects day-to-day tasks to the overall goals of the organization, serving as the link between the work of agents and the vision of upper management.

Working in such a people-focused environment can be immensely rewarding, but it’s also challenging, requiring leadership skills, product knowledge, and more. If you want to meet these challenges and become a more effective call centre manager, you must be aware of these seven pitfalls.

Why Focused and Effective Managers Are Essential to Call Centre Success

Without effective leadership, any organization will struggle. This is particularly true of the call centre, where a productive, engaged workforce is needed to meet rising customer expectations.

In the absence of a capable manager, core functions like successful hiring, attracting customers, and increasing profit will stutter. As a manager, you must always strive to improve your call centre and align everyone around organizational goals.

A poor leader doesn’t only slow down progress, they can reverse it. Below, we will explore some of the main reasons why effective managers are essential to call centre success.

Enhancing Customer Service

Delivering excellent customer service is one of the key aims of any contact centre, and managers are directly responsible for making this a reality.

A manager must oversee how agents interact with customers and respond to queries, and on occasion, even step in to handle call escalations and assist customers.

Without an effective manager to ensure agents are delivering the highest possible level of customer service, key metrics like CSAT and NPS will suffer.

Aligning and Monitoring KPIs

Speaking of metrics, a key aspect of the manager’s role is aligning call centre KPIs with higher-level organizational goals.

As a link between agents and upper management, a call centre manager must select the right KPIs to present to the C-suite. Selecting the appropriate KPIs also helps to improve productivity, enhance customer experience, and inform decision-making.

Focusing and Motivating Agents

Agents are the frontline of any call centre, and if they aren’t performing at their best, the whole organization will struggle.

As a manager, you are responsible for empowering agents to succeed. To do so, you need to motivate your team every day, providing the necessary support and keeping everyone focused on the task at hand.

Agent retention may be an ongoing challenge in the industry, with NICE reporting an average attrition rate of 42 percent, but strong leadership can protect your organization from churn.

Ensuring Appropriate and Timely Training and Coaching

Delivering the right training is another key aspect of the manager’s job. This goes far beyond the initial agent onboarding stage—continuous learning is key to a productive, thriving team.

Using tools like scorecards, you can identify areas for improvement and deliver tailored training based on this data.

This could cover anything from soft skills to regulatory compliance. The important thing is that the training is targeted to each agent. Without an effective manager to keep the team in top shape via coaching, standards will slip.

Spotting and Promoting Top Talent

Every team has its stars, and a good leader knows how to identify and support these top performers. In your role as manager, you are responsible for identifying those agents who excel and encouraging them to grow.

There is a path to management for agents who display the right traits, and if you think someone in your team has what it takes, you can be a mentor figure for them as they advance their career.

Building a Strong Team of Agents and Team Leads

Call centre work is a team sport. A good manager helps to assemble, develop, and guide this team as they strive to hit their targets.

Hiring the right people is part of the process, but no team will succeed long-term without the right leadership. An effective manager will do more than improve performance; they will make the team feel valued and convince them to stick around.

Increasing Profit

At the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line, and the day-to-day work of the call centre management goes a long way to determining the organization’s profitability. If a manager is tracking the wrong metrics, struggling to motivate the team, or failing to satisfy customers, the profit margin will shrink. On the other hand, a manager that gets their team firing on all cylinders can be a driving force for revenue growth.

Main Pitfalls to Avoid to Be a Successful Call Centre Manager

There are plenty of steps you can take to be a successful call centre manager, but it’s just as important to be aware of what you shouldn’t do.

Bad managers can negatively impact morale and company processes, leading to poor performance, increased agent turnover, and decreased profit. If you want to avoid such problems, look out for these seven pitfalls.

#1. Disregarding Emotional Intelligence

In the people-focused world of the call centre, emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize and regulate emotions, is key.

It is a vital soft skill that impacts both agent and customer experience. Managers who dismiss the importance of emotional intelligence will struggle to handle conflict, communicate effectively, or build meaningful relationships.

#2. Failing to Delegate

While it may sound admirable to take on extra work, the reality is that taking on too much can actually impact performance levels.

By spreading yourself too thin, you limit your ability to truly focus on what matters most. Delegating less important tasks helps you to focus on the big issues and shows your agents that you trust them with added responsibility, boosting morale.

#3. Promoting the Culture of Overworking

An effective manager understands that a culture of overworking will only lead to burnout and resentment. More importantly, they understand that, as a leader, they set the tone and hold the responsibility for promoting a healthy work-life balance.

Nobody wants to come to work for a manager with unrealistic expectations, so it’s important that you set achievable goals and understand that your agents are people, not drones.

Making the call centre a place where your team enjoys their work will reap much greater results than a toxic environment where agents can’t wait to leave every day.

#4. Losing Sight of the Long-Term Goals

With all the small details that go into keeping a call centre running, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

While the busywork can pile up and pull you in different directions, it’s vital that you always take time to step back and recalibrate.

In the end, your performance will be judged on your ability to achieve organizational goals and meet your team’s targets. This ties into our previous point about delegating. If you find yourself losing focus, perhaps it’s time to delegate and get back to your main duties as a manager.

#5. Forgetting to Lead by Example

‘Show, don’t tell’ is considered a golden rule for writers—and it can also be applied to call centre managers. It’s not enough to tell your agents what you want from them; you must display those same qualities and lead by example.

If a manager is preaching about soft skills but fails to display any empathy or emotional intelligence in their own interactions with customers, why would agents listen to them? To motivate your team, you have to hold yourself to the same standards.

#6. Not Keeping Up to Date With Technology

Rapid advancement in technology has led to huge innovation in the industry. While agents are still your most valuable resource, you can enable them to perform at their best by investing in the right tools.

Managers who fail to keep up with new call centre technology like conversational analytics will miss out on improvements in efficiency and customer experience.

#7. Overlooking Data Insights

While every manager will monitor metrics in relation to performance targets, it’s important to remember that you can also use analytics software to derive actionable insights around team performance. With QA software, you can generate a data-driven basis for your decision-making.

What You Can Do to Become a Better Call Centre Manager

Avoiding pitfalls is one thing, but truly excellent call centre managers are always looking for ways to get better.

With a recent report finding that 82 percent of employees would consider leaving their job because of a bad manager, it’s important to pay attention to your leadership style. By following the steps below, you can become an even more effective manager.

Focus on Improving Your Communication Skills

In the call centre, communication is king. As a manager, you need to develop a rapport with agents, customers, and upper management.

The relationships you forge with others will inform your understanding of how your call centre is running and what changes you may want to make.

Transparent, collaborative relationships with agents allow you to educate but also actively listen and learn about their needs and challenges.

Be sure to schedule meetings and organize regular one-on-ones to get a full picture of how your agents are doing. Through good communication with your team, you can clearly convey the organization’s vision while also identifying performance issues.

Demonstrate Integrity

As noted in the previous section, failing to lead by example can be detrimental to the call centre manager’s success. Its key aspect is demonstrating integrity.

As the head of the team, you need to set the standard for ethics and transparency in the call centre. This will not only instill a sense of trust among team members, but it will also encourage a culture of transparency, leading to better morale and engagement.

If you can demonstrate the core values that make a great manager, you will be better equipped to inspire these values in your agents.

Take Accountability

Everyone makes mistakes, managers and agents alike. The important thing is that you are accountable for these mistakes and treat them as opportunities for learning.

Delegating tasks to agents is fine—delegating responsibility for your mistakes isn’t. You should also channel emotional intelligence we discussed earlier and engage in active listening to gather feedback from agents and understand what you could do better next time.

Expand Your Product and Service Knowledge

Developing a stronger understanding of your company’s product or service is essential if you want to become a more effective call centre manager.

As a leader, you must have the right knowledge to adequately support your team, advise agents, and assist with customer queries. Becoming an expert can help you  better solve internal problems, resolve conflict, and handle escalations.

Engage With Customers

Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and practice what you preach. Get on the phone, take some calls, handle difficult customers, and solve complex problems.

Overseeing operations is one thing, but your agents will respect you much more if you lead by example. Direct interactions with customers will also help you to better understand their needs.

You may garner insights into what you could be doing differently or how you could change things to better serve customers.

Look Into Upskilling Opportunities

Learning is a lifelong habit, especially for those in management positions. No matter how much you know, there’s always room to grow.

This is particularly true in the call centre industry, with new technology emerging on a near-daily basis and processes always in need of refinement.

To stand out as a leader, you should invest in your own development and identify opportunities to upskill. You could study for a new certification, attend a bootcamp, travel to an event, or even seek out a mentor.

Final Thoughts

A great manager is the glue that holds the call centre together, aligning day-to-day operations with the broader vision of the organization.

While managing a call centre is challenging and requires leadership skills, product knowledge, and personal integrity, it’s also rewarding.

As a manager, you have the opportunity to help agents grow, assist customers, and drive your company forward.

To reap these rewards, you must be careful to avoid common leadership pitfalls like failing to delegate, disregarding emotional intelligence, and neglecting data insights.

Using a purpose-built QA tool you can avoid these mistakes. It gives you direct insights into every aspect of call centre performance, with in-depth analytics tools allowing you to generate high-level reports and drill down for individual data.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.