How to Manage Call Center Staff Effectively

Workforce Management Relating to Help Desk Personnel

Sep 28, 2009

Managers face many challenges in getting the best performance out of call center staff. What is the best way of handling personnel without compromising on productivity?

Managing a large call center can present a huge challenge for staff manager. How can he or she evaluate the staff fairly based on call center statistics, while at the same time ensuring customer satisfaction?

Managing Call Center Agents

Call center staff are often driven by statistics. They need to close a certain amount of calls a day. The bigger the call center, the more important these stats become since it is often the only way of measuring productivity.

The challenge that faces most call center managers is that it is very difficult to encourage staff to go the extra mile for clients if they are trying to close as many calls as possible. There are two scenarios that are all too familiar to managers:

In view of this, the manager needs to have a holistic view of the productivity of his or her staff members.

Recording conversations and randomly playing these conversations of staff members who appear to be slacking is one way of monitoring this. Performance should not be limited to but should include statistics.

Call Logging Systems

Using a call logging system that allows for updates and notes on each call can be very useful. Calls that seem to take too long to close can be monitored at random to ascertain whether a call center staff agent is going the extra mile, or whether they are being lazy.

In an IT call center environment it has been noticed that some staff tend to take on the easy calls that can be closed quickly so as to boost their stats. Other agents are left with the difficult calls that require more effort to close. This can skew the statistics considerably. While statistics are a good thing to motivate staff to take calls and close them quickly as possible, it cannot be the only factor when reviewing staff performance. When assessing key performance areas, it is important to take into consideration these factors.

Assigning Work to Call Center Agents

Some managers have resorted to assigning the calls to the agents. This is fine for low volume call centers, but will waste too much of the manager's time once the call volume picks up. Others try to solve the problem by allowing inbound calls to be picked up in a “round robin” fashion. This might work for telephonic support, but not so well if the customers log calls via a web interface. In view of this, the manager should rather have an “eagle eye” approach to running the call center, ready to swoop and intervene if he perceives a problem or a trend developing. A call center manager should not become involved in each call that comes in, but rather focus on trends related to call type, and those calls that are escalated.

In large call centers, supervisors are often appointed to provide the “ears and eye” function for the manager, handling escalations below a certain well defined level.

The Client and Call Center Staff

Clients will always remember the staff member who went the extra mile for them, and will recommend the company to others. Often, it is the simple follow up to the client to see if they are satisfied that makes all the difference. If an agent takes longer over a call, or closes less calls over a period of time because of this, he or she should not be penalized.

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Source: Peter Hupston, IT Help Desk Manager, Legalwise S.A., interviewed on 26 September, 2009

The copyright of the article How to Manage Call Center Staff Effectively in Customer Relations is owned by Fleur Hupston. Permission to republish How to Manage Call Center Staff Effectively in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.