In all call centres the cream of the team rises to the top and is made a team leader or even a manager. These people are often selected on their people-skills, their knowledge of the business and their ability to manage customers effectively. However, author explains, the excitement of promotion can easily become the discomfort of having to manage people who, only yesterday, were peers.
Team leaders who have faced this issue describe many uncomfortable situations such as:
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Having to address a performance problem with a colleague who is also a friend
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Having to face the resentment of friends who cannot accept the change in relationship
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Being accused of being aloof and stand-offish when refusing to take part in gossip
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Friends trying to take advantage of the situation in order to get special treatment
One team leader commented to the author ‘I used to be one of the girls – now I am resented as management and yet they do not accept me as their manager’. Typical reactions in new team leaders are:
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Trying to stay part of the social group by avoiding stepping over the line into management
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Avoiding ‘little performance issues’ such as poor timekeeping at breaks due to fear of appearing dictatorial
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Being over-friendly in order to get the team on their side only to face more difficulties when issues arise
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Being over-protective of the team and trying to avoid decisions or protect them from changes being pushed through by senior management
Obviously, such situations are not conducive to effective management. However, there are a number of things that can be done, both at a business level and also by new team leaders.
What the leader can do
Leaders need to face change quickly and smoothly and avoid behaviours of treading on eggshells or stamping their authority. Tactics which will help include:
Having set up and committed to your ground rules the next step is to set up a team meeting and go through the ground rules. This may not feel comfortable, but it is better than trying to assume yourself into a role which others do not understand or accept.
Start as you mean to go on – one of the first steps in establishing your position is to have a one-to-one meeting with each team member and set out your expectations and goals. Be sure that your approach is friendly and firm and be careful to assert your expectations with anyone who attempts to use the friendship card.
Create a team event with you at the lead – a very quick way to establish yourself in a manger role is to set up a team event to create a team service culture. The team event needs to start with your vision of the team and the service levels, including any specific improvement projects. The rest of the event can then focus on how the team will work together to achieve your culture and service. Such an event establishes the team leader as the driver of the team.
Move quickly on performance issues – a rapid way to establish your team leadership is to address any performance issue very early on. Again, this will feel uncomfortable, but failing to do this will give the message that you will accept less than the best from your friends. When addressing such issues be very clear in stating that you are now in a management role and then get to the point quickly with your concerns and the changes you want to see.
Avoid any fall back – being a leader is tough and often lonely. All too often, leaders miss the social support and the fun of working with peers. However, reverting to peer behaviour is a step back from leadership. Stepping back up into the leader role is all the harder thereafter. Instead you need to see other leaders as your source of support and when necessary turn to HR for assistance. The toughest times are when you have to drive change which you know your team will dislike. When facing such situations it is very important to talk through the implications with HR and get assistance with delivering the messages.
What the business can do
The business needs to recognise that becoming a team leader involves transition into a new role and also a new perspective. Wherever possible the following initiatives need to be put in place:
Movement – whenever possible promotion to team leader should be linked to a move to a new team. This can be achieved by open selection processes in which team leader roles are advertised across the business and people can apply to be team leader of another team.
Focused selection – the selection process should explore the person’s understanding of the required transition and the changes they will have to make in working relationships. People who do not have plans for managing the change should not be promoted.
Training – all too many team leaders go into the role with little or no management training. All new team leaders should be given training in how to set objectives, set expectations, delegate, give feedback and manage performance issues.
Transition support – change is rarely easy or smooth. New team leaders would benefit from support sessions in which they are talked through the change and given coaching in how to adjust quickly. Such support can be delivered by HR, external coaches or even experienced team leaders who have managed the change in the past.
In short, moving from mate to manager is rarely a comfortable path. However, those who do it successfully have the support of the business and also establish their own leadership credentials very early. Being clear about your role, what you will do and how you will manage is the key to success. You must then hold the leader line when times get tough.
Special Thanks to: callcenterhelpre.com
In call center many young professionals work because of higher chances of enhance their career to the maximum level. For the Customers call centers are always on top of the list to get the information. To maintain call centers presence towards the global trend in this industry is a challenge for the call centers service providers. Call center companies always make sure to deliver efficient services to their clients worldwide as possible. Because call center is a promising industry.
Hiring the right people is very important. The call centers should provide ongoing training to the agents and employees; practice the transparency like communicating openly with the agents and managers, discovering the quality performance of the best people, investing to the state-of-the-art technology to increase customer satisfaction.
There are many good things you can do to support the call center industry. There are do 's and don'ts in order to set limitation to the workers. The following are the don't 's that call center employees should do:
Be Punctual: Time is precious and is important to be on time on duty. Your punctuality will give you the honor to be recognized by your team leaders or supervisors. Also, you are not the asset of the company because call center is a fast paced regulated industry that time is important. If you are always on time then the result will be positive all time.
Be Active: Promptness will help you to give the good impression to your customers. It will also count in your job performance. Be productive always and serve as role model to your fellow agents. Show them the real you that you are happy with what you are doing. There are many call center agents who were terminated because of this bad impression despite several times of IR (incidental report) issued to them.
Avoid Repulsive Behavior: Never displaying your repulsive behavior while you are inside company's premises. When taking to the customer, talk with them with pleasure and with care. Always use professional words which sounds good to your customer. If caught, doing inappropriate talk to customers this may the end of your promising career in your in the call center.
Be Responsible For Assigned Work: Think of your responsibility as an employee of the company. While you are on duty, avoid playing around with other agents. Respect their privacy while they are on call and focusing on their job. This behavior can cause immediate violation because you are disturbing your co-workers instantly. Always put the fun in the right time. Implementing self-discipline is the best way to get rid of this disturbing behavior.
These are only few don't that you we need to implement. This can make the job easier if everybody is following the simple orders stated under the rules and regulations. It is important that the discipline must start on our own. The call center industry continues to give outstanding opportunity to everybody. It helps the economy prosper and lower the unemployment rate in the world.
According to Dimension Data’s "Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007″, a massive 70% of the cost of running contact centres are related to the people who work there: the agents or customer services representatives. The report also reveals that the UK contact centre industry wastes close to half a million pounds every month as a result of its average 24% staff attrition rate.
Live testing of agents and we call it mock call. HR department have to take some steps regarding this. They should implement a policy (can be shown as HR policy) in which they have to clear the new agents that they will get finalised only when they will clear the mock call's round. Through this we will get the result about the new agents whether they are capable and good enough to handle the stress and pressure of process. As it came in a research report, many companies (25%+) still haven't introduce this mock call's round in the part of their hiring policy.
Agent must be aware about the process and responsibilities he/she will going to be implement on them and because of that they hired by the company. The growth and progress must be cleared to everyone att he time of hiring. Although there is perception in a this industry that people get into this industry because of fame, money and the diffrent facilities providing by company but those who taking and joining this industry for the long time and want to make a career in call center. They are really serious about the career development and if they stuck with the organisation for long time then they will get good oppotunity and good carrer chances in this industry.
They should keep the simplification and process flow as simple as they can. There is a possibility that some agents might not be good in using computers incomparsion to tech savvy agents. Work flow analyst must provide the process flow where agents not to toggle between multiple windows and application. If possible as this could be a stressful and time-consuming act while a important client/customer is on call.
Interestingly, although 77% of the organisations surveyed in the Dimension Data report and that reports say they have workflow solutions in place, only 32% have some form of decision support or case-based reasoning system to prompt agents with answers to customer queries.
Do you know how many people need to achieve theri service levels and create satisfied customers? Do you break this down per hour per day, and schedule staff with the right skills and experience accordingly? If not, then you are really in bad staffing policy and might be suffering from a huge hidden staffing cost, increased attrition with associated recruitment and training costs.
Alternatively, you may be under-staffed, resulting in high abandonment rates, stressed staff, reduced first call resolution and dissatisfied customers. Workforce management tools have now reached maturity and can deliver a rapid return on investment; the main issue today is ensuring the tool is set up correctly and managed by a trained scheduler. According to the Dimension Data research, the top development strategy is customer satisfaction at 87%, with staff satisfaction close behind at 70%. I would therefore suggest there is no good reason for a mid-size or large contact centre not to adopt a properly managed, industry standard workforce management tool.
Good training is key for success of a call center, poorly trained agents deliver a poor customer experience, leading to unhappy customers and, therefore, stressed employees who leave or go sick. Providing initial training is just a beginning of agents career and process, there are so many different kind of queries which came time to time while process is on the go in this case agents often need help with complex or infrequent queries.
Training must be provided by professional coaches, trainers, or virtual coaching systems. The latter essentially can provide step-by-step desktop assistance through processes, with a blend of specialist staff and virtual coaching providing arguably the optimum solution.
Dimension Data’s research shows that an average of around 17 hours of coaching is delivered to agents per month. This can cost-effectively be increased using a real-time online virtual coaching tool delivered to the agents at their desktops, resulting in improved first call resolution and employee and customer satisfaction.
We should greet the agents by giving them incentives, rewards & recognitions by various monetary and non-monetary methods. Rewards provide a great feedback mechanism and agents will get motivated and they will give good productivity whatever you will give them, so you need to ensure you don’t reward skewed behaviors also, rewards can be great motivators if applied correctly.
Motivation and training must happen frequently and consistently in the International Call Center. The agents are spending the maximum time in the call centers to take care of the customers. As we know human being we all need the encouragement and the motivation to perform good. Motivation is the great factor to get the maximum output from the agents for their assign work. And it's all depends on the call center management team to take care of this point very carefully. It is always good if agents are having previous work experience of the call center but it is not sure that agent will perform the best and need no motivation. Even the agents are old or new all need lot's of motivation to work. Also we believes that having call center experience isn't necessarily a sound recommendation for a customer service representative job.
Hear I am writing the Six factors to give the motivation to agents while training time.
Empower agents : It is very essential to provide the quality management tools which can easily understandable for each agents. To empower the call center agents the training of the software is very useful. Quality management tools also empower agents because they can listen to their own interactions and recognize where they need to make improvements. In addition, they can also listen to "best-in-class" interactions from their peers to learn how they can improve the customer interaction by imitating successful agent behavior. Quality monitoring allows agents to gain additional control over their performance appraisals by having the ability to review their own calls and calibrate their results with those of their supervisor.
Happy agents will give fruitful result: We can know the agents are happy or not while monitoring the calls.. It is always true if the agents are happy and relaxed then they will give good response to the customer's queries. They will never loose the potential customers. Motivation to the agent by joke, party, fun, or good movie etc will also play a big role for their happiness.
Communication Skills Motivation: The trainers is fully responsible to give the best training to the agents. Trainer can motivate the agents if they find the communication skills are not good. Motivation must be in such a way that agents can feel that this training is for their better carrier & skills in future. During training, make sure to ask for feedback from trainees throughout, and refrain from using a lecture style, she said, adding that it's important to revisit curriculum frequently to ensure that the information is fresh. Also, make training separate from the work shift, and pay overtime for it.
Self Development Led To Improved Customer Service: Change is nature, it never remain the same. As same every human being wants to keep some change in them self for the growth. Motivate your agent to develop the ability to learn by themselves. Motivate them to be independent, this make them to take care of the customers in very well manner. This small motivation will make customer service process more satisfying to the customers and self-development has also led to improved customer service.
Inform About The Money: Call center agents should be kept informed about financial information. Agents should know how performance can be quantified in the call center. If your call center management team permit then you can motivate the agents by saying - The average cost per call to the agents and also inform if a customer's problem isn't solved then this call rate will be double for the company. If agents know about the money of the call or the cost then agent will take more care while interacting to the customers.
Rewards for Motivation: It is always best to reward the agents according to the performance to keep healthy competition among all agents. This is the motivation factor which can motivate the agent to perform better then yesterday.
Though this may work best in sales-oriented call centers, most managers can take a proactive approach to staffing turnover to maintain overall quality.
From-
Vcare Call Center India
In today’s contact center, where the overwhelming majority of ongoing expense is related to staffing, optimizing the personnel resource is critical. Getting the “just right” number of staff in place to answer incoming calls, place outbound calls, respond to emails, and handle web contacts. is critical to call center success and profitability. Over staffing results in spending needless dollars for additional staff, while under staffing will affect service and have a detrimental effect on morale and contribute to staff turnover.
Call center managers have a wealth of performance and service statistics available to them from the ACD and other contact center technologies. Call volume, time-of-day call distribution, and contact handle times are now available, along with much information about individual and team productivity. All this information can be used to estimate future call volumes, predict how many staff will be required to handle the contacts, and determine schedules that best match the workforce to the contact workload.
The Need Workforce management tools: The changing mix of contact volume, coupled with the growing complexity of staff scheduling (longer operating hours, weekend shifts, mixture of full- and part-time staff, etc.) make the problem of workforce management ideally suited for the computer. Workforce management (WFM) software, combined with the historical and real-time statistics of the ACD, is an essential tool for today’s professionally managed call center.
Workforce management tools are used to keep sales and customer call center resources happy. I am familiar with two separate areas where this is most often used:
1. Sales force incentive management – assuring that sales and business goals are aligned and that sales staff are properly motivated to deliver the right results and avoid compensation issues and disputes.
2. Call center staff optimization – assuring that resources are properly managed and scheduled to deliver superior customer service, provide incentive, track progress and increase retention.
The basic functions associated with a workforce management software system are as follows:
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Call volume forecasting. A WFM system uses historical and current call information from the ACD and other contact center systems to predict future call volume based on overall calling trends, seasonal factors, and other predictable calling patterns. Forecasts are automatically updated with new information about contact patterns through a direct interface with contact center systems such as the ACD, outbound dialer, or email/fax servers.
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Staffing calculations. A telephone traffic engineering technique is used to determine the required number of staff based on the forecast workload for incoming calls. This technique, called Erlang C, takes into account the random arrival of calls into the center, as well as the “hold for the first agent” queuing that typically takes place. Other mathematical models are used to factor in the sequential workload of emails and/or outbound calling.
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Staff scheduling. “Bodies in chairs” staff requirements along with non-productive time estimates (for breaks, trainings, meetings, etc.) are used to determine a schedule requirement for each half-hour or quarter-hour period. A set of optimal schedules is then created based on these requirements and a call center’s unique scheduling rules and constraints. These schedules are then assigned to staff based shift bid rules and employee preferences.
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Day-to-day performance tracking. Perhaps the most critical component of a workforce management system is the intra-day comparison of actual performance against the plan. Call center management must actively compare actual workload by half-hour to the forecast, and actual number of staff on the phones to the schedule plan. The call center manager needs to see these changes as they are happening, in order to make necessary adjustments to meet service goals.
Cost Justifying Workforce Management Tools
Not all call centers need an automated system to accomplish workforce management tasks. Need is a function of size and operating complexity. Generally call centers with more than 30 agents with an increasingly complex scheduling environment (round-the- clock operations or an increasing volume of emails/faxes, for example) can cost justify automating these functions.
An automated workforce management system generally produces measurable improvements in the following areas:
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More efficient scheduling. The savings associated with more efficient scheduling can take many forms, including reduced overall staff hours, reduced need for overtime, and identification of overstaffed periods to offer time off without pay. Workforce management system users generally experience a minimum reduction of staff hours of 2 % and average potential is in the 5 – 10% range.
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Automation of workforce management tasks. Depending on how often forecasting and scheduling tasks take place and to what degree they are currently automated, there is a wide range of potential savings in staff time by automating these tasks with a full-featured workforce management system. It is generally expected that at least 25% of administrative and managerial time currently devoted to the manual performance of these tasks can be saved.
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Reduction in workforce shrinkage. Many hours of staff time are lost in most call centers due to excessive amounts of non-productive time (time spent not handling calls). An automated workforce management system can provide historical and real- time information on schedule adherence and schedule exceptions for better management and control of staff, reducing workforce shrinkage by 2-5% in most call centers.
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Reduction in network costs. By creating a set of schedules that minimizes under staffing as well as over staffing, implementing workforce management results in a more consistent level of service to callers and may reduce queue time and toll-free network costs.
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Increased revenues. For call centers that realize revenue by answering calls (catalogs, reservations centers, etc.), workforce management automation can help reduce queue times and improve service, thereby reducing the number of abandons and increasing the number of revenue calls completed.
(To determine an estimated payback period, take the estimated savings from Items 1-5 above for estimated annual savings or divide by 12 for an estimated monthly savings in the first year of implementation. The payback period on such a system can be calculated by dividing the one-time purchase price by the average monthly savings.)
In addition to these measurable cost savings, there are many intangible benefits. Perhaps the biggest of these is the addition of a sophisticated “what-if” planning capability that allows management to forecast and plan staff needs for the short term to respond to unexpected changes, as well as long-term budgeting and planning.
Selection Guidelines
Organizations considering a workforce management purchase should heed the following guidelines:
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Cast a large net. Invite all qualified vendors to present their products. Insist on a detailed demonstration and ask lots of questions about how the package would work in meeting your center’s specific mode of operation
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Talk to others that have done it. At a minimum, talk to four or five other organizations similar to yours (in size, type of operation, ACD brand) that have implemented a system.
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Consider the support capabilities of each vendor. Workforce management software systems are not simple, off-the-shelf packages.
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Don’t suffer “sticker shock”. Prices for workforce management systems cover a wide range, depending on whether you are considering a single module, or a comprehensive integrated system. Some of the more comprehensive packages may seem expensive, but don’t lose sight of the fact that each agent employee may have a fully burdened cost of anywhere from $30,000 - $50,000 annually. Saving just a couple of employees’ labor expenses can quickly justify the most expensive package.
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Plan for a successful implementation. During the purchase process, it is critical to communicate and motivate everyone in the center to participate in the process. While implementing workforce management results in a more efficient operation and a less stressful environment in the long run, it is important to realize that such an implementation may mean a cultural change for agents, supervisors, and management in the short term.
Accomplishing Profitability and Service Objectives
Whether large or small, the objective of every contact center is to accomplish the most work at the highest level of service at the lowest cost. This objective is achieved through workforce management. The larger the workforce, the more complex the task, and the more suited the problem is for automation.
Not only do automated systems save substantial management and clerical time, but they can also reduce personnel costs dramatically by optimizing the staffing resource. Benefits include a more precise forecast of future call volumes showing peaks and valleys of calls, exact determination of staff needed for each period minimizing over staffing and under staffing, and the ability to monitor call center performance and make adjustments as needed within the day. The end result is the ability to handle more calls at a better level of service to the caller at a reduced cost.
February, 2008
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