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Call center management involves the use of various strategies to achieve one common goal; delivering customer service experiences that exceed expectations. In order for these strategies to be effective, they need to address every facet of managing a call center, which includes:
But where do some call centers fall short? Why do lots of companies outsource their customer service department? Most importantly of all, what makes an effective call center? Let’s explore the complex but rewarding world of call center performance management.
Call center management refers to the way businesses manage their daily call or contact center operations. It covers employee hiring and training, workforce scheduling, and customer interactions, among other things.
How your team handles these call center processes contributes to your call center’s performance.
The daily operation of a call center requires a tremendous amount of effort. But as far as addressing customer concerns go, here’s a simple explanation of how inbound and outbound call centers deliver customer service:
A call center can handle both inbound and outbound customer calls. It’s also possible to have an entire call center workforce based in different locations; in which case, it’s called a remote call center.
When it comes to call center success, there’s no definitive formula that ensures a call center performs well. But when the entire customer service team is working together and using the right call center technology, it’s a great first step.
Let’s take a close look at the two key roles in a company’s customer service department—call center manager (or supervisor) and call center agent.
Call center supervisors are people who are responsible for managing a call center’s operations in order to support the company’s customer service goals.
They may also be responsible for applying relevant call center improvement strategies.
Let’s find out exactly what their role entails.
As call center supervisors have a lot on their plate, it’s important for you to hire the most well-rounded candidate.
Here are the top skills you need to look for:
A call center agent is responsible for managing inbound and outbound customer calls for a business. They operate as the company’s front line, handling issues like product complaints, billing concerns, support requests, and more.
Call center agents may also go by names like customer service representatives, customer care representatives, telephone service attendants, or telesales agents. You’ve probably heard of the term contact center agent—contact center agents handle emails, live chats, social media messages, and other interactions via digital channels on top of traditional phone calls.
The main duties of a call center agent are to answer and dial out customer calls. Incoming calls usually mean responding to queries, addressing complaints, taking orders, and troubleshooting problems.
Outgoing calls, on the other hand, normally come in the form of gathering survey data, setting appointments, and relaying promotional offers.
Here’s a list of typical call center agent duties:
It’s a given that call center agents must have exceptional communication skills. Apart from that, they have to be empathetic, organized, able to retain information well, and keep calm under pressure.
The success of a business depends not only on sales reps closing deals but also on call center agents delivering great after-sales care. And that’s where successful call center operations play a vital role.
With effective call center management, any issues or questions that customers have can be dealt with efficiently and satisfactorily, meaning that customers are more likely to stay with your business.
When call center management is done correctly, the benefits for call centers include:
Knowing how to manage a call center effectively is vital for delivering optimum customer service. Let’s take a look at areas that you should focus on for call center management success before finding out the best practices to follow:
To achieve call center management success, areas that you should focus on include:
A vital component of successful call center management is quality management. All staff should be trained on the level of quality that they should deliver when in contact with customers, and how to achieve it.
Calls should be monitored to ensure that this level of quality is always being achieved, and staff should receive further training where necessary.
Providing call center agents with the best possible training will yield results for your customers and the business as a whole.
When training your agents, ensure they know all the ins and outs of the company’s products and services so that they can provide reliable answers to any questions that customers have.
Reporting and analytics are crucial for call center management. After all, how would a manager know what needs to be improved or what’s being done exactly as it should be without any solid data to back it up?
Useful metrics for call center managers to track include average handle time, CSAT, and first contact resolution.
Now, let’s look at some contact center best practices that will help elevate customer experiences:
Following these best practices for call centers can help ensure your operations run smoothly.
Call center management best practices begin with hiring a special group of people. Apart from the technical skills, you want to go for those who have a genuine passion for customer service. Take the time to screen new employees both for know-how and character.
Make sure the candidates you picked are ready for the tasks at hand. It’s important to have a comprehensive training and onboarding program.
This is the time to communicate your company’s standards while instilling good habits from the start. You may also improve employee weaknesses or mitigate any hiring mistakes.
With thorough training and onboarding processes in place, your new agents feel better equipped to handle any type of customer call.
A great way to empower your agents is to develop a coaching culture. What you want is an environment that promotes continuous learning and creates opportunities for growth not just for agents but also for other call center staff.
Schedule meetings with individual agents not only to provide targeted coaching but also to share ideas for personal and process improvements. Remember that agents are at the front line of the call center and often have a better view of issues as they arise.
Make sure your communication lines are always open. Agents and team leaders appreciate an approachable supervisor who welcomes feedback and is always ready to discuss employee issues.
Working in a call center can be overwhelming, and the stress it brings can hamper agent productivity. This can be a bigger problem for smaller call centers where agents usually extend hours to accommodate their workload. They may be able to get more work done but not without sacrificing quality.
The answer is proper scheduling. Make sure to give your agents enough time to recharge so they don’t feel overworked. When scheduling, consider factors like peak hours, agent ability, and time between shifts, among others.
A spike in call volume may force small call center teams to handle more work than usual. Inversely, there may not be enough work to keep everyone in larger teams occupied. Your goal is to balance everything out.
Review staffing levels so you can wisely forecast call volumes and determine how many agents you’ll need in any situation. Think about average call volumes and peak times per day, week, month, and year. You should also consider the number of agents needed to ensure short wait times.
By balancing your workflow, you’ll not only meet demands but also keep labor costs to a minimum.
Smart companies understand the importance of data. In the context of customer service, data gathered in a call center allows you to know your customers better and understand their behavior.
Net promoter score, average handling time, and first-call resolution rate are just some of the important metrics that allow a call center manager to gain insight into operations and make important decisions.
The importance of monitoring calls can’t be overemphasized. When you monitor calls, you’re able to see any cracks in agent performance. Your findings will boost your performance management initiatives—you’ll be able to provide quality feedback, empower your agents, and streamline your call center processes.
RingCentral uses RingSense AI for automated conversation summaries, scoring, and feedback to ensure quality performance.
You also get valuable features like call whisper, which allows managers to give instructions to agents without the customer hearing it, and call barge, which allows them to take over an ongoing call.
Successful call centers understand their customers. They know that the metrics call center managers keep an eye on only tell a part of the story. To get a better feel for what customers want, you have to ask them directly.
Customer feedback presents a way for you to hear the voice of the customer. Any review or opinion you get should help you make the necessary adjustments to improve customer experiences and make them stay.
A good way to elicit feedback is to conduct surveys through phone, email, or social media.
Aside from the people, another strong driver of call center management success is technology.
You may have a manager and agents with the best intentions and résumés, but without proper technology, such as speech analytics software, to complement their efforts, it could be tough for your call center to reach its full potential.
Trusted platforms, like the one offered by RingCentral, provide a comprehensive suite of features like call monitoring, interactive voice response (IVR), and skills-based routing.
As a call center manager, you don’t want to miss out on anything that would enhance your overall efficiency.
You want to stay on top of the latest advancements, whether it’s the newest workforce management techniques or the latest contact center software.
All the call center management tips mentioned above deliver a positive impact on both customer and employee engagement. Add a good customer experience platform into the mix, and you have a call center that’s built for success.
A call center manager is expected to monitor customer behavior and help enhance the performance of their staff.
They should be able to gather data and analyze metrics to identify trends, create reports, and refine processes—all for the purpose of improving customer experience, agent performance, and ultimately, call center performance.
Below are some important call center metrics that provide great value when you’re measuring performance.
First-call resolution rates show how many issues were fixed at the first time of asking. Companies use it to evaluate their service level standards. A high FCR rate (around 90%) means agents are efficient at resolving issues at the first point of contact.
Customers don’t need to make follow-up calls or switch to digital channels like chat, email, or social media.
Let’s look at the two ways you can measure FCR:
Gross FCR is measured by dividing the number of cases resolved in a single call—those that can actually be resolved in the first call, including cancellations, upgrades, and booking changes—by the total number of incoming calls you received.
| Gross FCR = | Number of cases resolved on the first call |
| All incoming calls |
Of course, not all cases can be addressed in one call. If you don’t factor that into your equation, you might get a distorted picture of your call center’s performance. This is why many companies prefer to use net FCR.
Net FCR takes cases that can’t be resolved on the first call (e.g., support issues and hardware repair) into account. That number is subtracted from the total number of incoming calls received.
| Net FCR = | Number of cases resolved on the first call |
| All incoming calls - Cases that can’t be resolved at the first call |
To get the gross FCR or net FCR rate, you just have to multiply the quotient by 100.
Average handling time refers to the average time to address customer issues. It covers the amount of time a customer waits in a queue, call duration, and after-call work time.
You can calculate AHT by first adding the agent’s total talk time, total hold time, and total after-call work time. Then you divide the sum by the total number of calls to get the average handle time.
| AHT = | Total talk time + Total hold time + Total after-call work time |
| Total number of calls |
Keep in mind that low AHT isn’t always good. Let’s say an agent encounters an irate customer who wants to cut his video subscription. The agent easily gives in to the customer’s request for fear that his AHT would shoot up.
Compare this with a situation in which an agent may have spent a little more time on the call but managed to calm the customer down and address their concerns.
What’s a good way to assess customer loyalty? Ask customers themselves. You do this by posing this simple question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend the company or agent you spoke with to a colleague or friend?.” (If you want, you can append this with a follow-up question—“Why?”)
You can run the survey over the phone or other communication channels. Based on customers’ responses, you’ll get your quantitative score:
To calculate your NPS, add your number of detractors, passives, and promoters. Get the percentage of each group by dividing each segment total by the total number of survey responses. Then subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The resulting difference is your NPS.
A little confusing? Here’s an example. Let’s say you received 100 survey responses:
15 Detractors - 15%
40 Passives - 40%
45 Promoters - 45%
NPS (45% - 15%) - 30%
In this case, you have a low NPS. Any score above 50% is considered decent because it means you have at least 50% more promoters than you have detractors. But let’s not forget that there’s one more element to your survey question—“Why?”
The answers you get will give you valuable insight as to why customers are satisfied or not with your service.
The ultimate goal of a call center is to make customers happy. When they’re happy, they give positive feedback and are more likely to recommend your service to people they know.
A good indicator of customer happiness is the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), which is given to an agent.
CSAT is measured by asking your customers a question about a particular interaction they’ve had with an agent (e.g., “Were you satisfied with how our agent handled your concern?”). The customer is provided with a survey scale they have to fill out, typically 1-10, with 10 being the highest.
The CSAT score is calculated by adding all of the scores an agent received and dividing the sum by the number of surveys.
| CSat score = | Total score agent received |
| Total number of surveys received |
These are just some of the top metrics you can use to drive call center performance. As a call center manager, you’ll also deal with cost per contact, abandoned call rate, average call transfer rate, and more.
As a company, you need to be able to serve every type of customer, from young people who spend lots of time on social media and messaging platforms to professionals who want fast, straightforward replies over the phone.
The right call or contact center solution empowers agents, enhances customer experience, and drives successful call center strategies—all of which are crucial for successful call center management.
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