The A-to-Z Guide to Contact Center Management

The responses your customers receive when communicating with your company can be the difference between earning their unbreakable loyalty or sending them into the arms of your competition. Consequently, competent contact center management is critical to your business’s success.

Effective management produces tangible results. For instance, one study found that companies investing more than 50% of their sales training budget into management training outperform those that do not.

Of course, spending alone doesn’t ensure good management. You have to implement sound strategies and work with the right people.

Dig into this guide to learn how you can properly manage your contact center.

Key Takeaways:

• Successful contact center management results in top-notch customer experiences.
• Contact center managers and supervisors must be good communicators, efficient organizers, and capable decision-makers.
• Contact center best practices include intelligent hiring and training, as well as using software to collect and interpret the appropriate metrics.

What Defines Successful Contact Center Management?

Contact center management involves all the ways you direct your daily contact center operations. Typical tasks include onboarding employees, scheduling workflows, and overseeing customer interactions.

All of this work is in service of creating positive customer experiences that ultimately contribute to reaching sales and revenue goals. Whether your contact center is an inbound help desk or outbound sales and marketing, CX is the key to favorable outcomes.

What Are the Critical Roles in a Contact Center?

If you’re a business owner starting or improving a contact center, establish a hierarchy of roles that permits your team to maximize performance.

Manager

Naturally, a manager should oversee all contact center management. This individual hires, trains, and leads all other contact center team members. 

Hiring a manager allows your top leadership to stay focused on the big picture. At the same time, the manager is critical in helping executives set performance goals and guiding the team to meet those objectives.

Supervisors

Supervisors should report to the manager and directly monitor specific groups of agents. For example, one supervisor might lead a team that focuses on outreach while another concentrates on inbound support.

Supervisors take a more granular approach and focus on hitting daily and weekly key performance indicators. These team leads need to be able to motivate and train customer-facing employees one on one.

Agents

Agents are your “boots on the ground” who deal with customers and callers. This is typically an entry-level position that can be in-office or remote. Always be on the lookout for promising agents who could become effective supervisors.

What Skills Do Contact Center Managers and Supervisors Need To Have?

Whether a manager or supervisor, your contact center management team must have a balanced mixture of essential skills to keep the intense environment operating fluidly. These attributes include:

• A comprehensive grasp of customer service: Customer service is the foundation of your contact center. Managers and supervisors must be able to discern how to appease callers while holding to company standards and values.
• Empathetic and efficient communication: Look for deep emotional intelligence, not just book smarts. Managers and supervisors must be able to speak honestly and tactfully to corporate leadership, subordinates, and callers.
• Outstanding time management: Good managers know how to stay on schedule and delegate tasks. They also understand how to use tools, such as contact center software, to boost productivity.
• Decision-making and problem-solving capabilities: Modern customers usually look for answers online or through automated solutions first and only reach out to human agents when they have pressing or complex situations. Managers need sharp skills in resolving challenges and making sound decisions.

A solid contact center management team is critical to employee satisfaction and retention. Provide professional development to help your management team refine and improve vital skills.

What Are Contact Center Management Best Practices?

With the right strategies and practices, your contact center management team will keep you on the path to success. 

Hiring the Right People

Contact centers have notoriously high agent turnover rates. While you can minimize that with solid leadership, stay on the lookout for qualified candidates. Always keep applications on file of individuals who display a knack for good customer service and technical competency.

Training Your Team Effectively

Even the most qualified employees can’t do their job well without sufficient instruction. Instill your vision and mission into your team members and keep them current on all necessary product and company info.

Promoting Employee Engagement

A coaching culture is essential to effective contact center management. Part of the reason for the high turnover in contact centers is the inevitable monotony of the assignment. 

Create an environment that helps workers feel like they’re advancing personally and professionally. This strengthens your workforce’s competency and engagement, leading to better customer experiences.

Collecting the Right Metrics

Efficiency experts are famous for saying: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This adage holds true in contact centers, where time and results are of the essence. 

Use the following metrics to understand how well you’re doing and how you can improve:

• First call resolution rates: Nothing makes callers happier than resolving an issue on the first contact. Aim for a high FCR.
• Average handling time: Callers also hate waiting on hold and having unnecessarily long conversations that cut into their day. Find the sweet spot for AHT that shows agents are fixing problems and not getting multiple hang-ups.
• Net promoter score: Survey customers to find out if they’re unhappy, content, or passionate fans. Measure your performance using the NPS system.
• Customer satisfaction score: Your CSAT is another scoring model your contact center management can use. This method has become popular in recent years.

You can ascertain and boost your progress with these critical performance indicators.

Getting the Best Software To Make Your Job Easier

Data collection, call monitoring, and scheduling can get unbearably labor-intensive. Find contact center software that has tools to simplify your work. For example, ensure you have interaction analytics to expedite the agent review and training process.

Which Contact Center Management Software Can Help Your Team Succeed? 

With so many balls to juggle at once with contact center management, you need the right software solution to work smarter and not harder. Talk to our team to find out how Intermedia Contact Center with SPARK AI technology can transform how you operate for the better.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.