2. Focus on Internal Motivation Factors

Orit Avital, General Manager at Ottorita, suggests three practical methods for inspiring the contact center floor.

What Role do Contact Center Managers Play in Inspiring Advisors?

To be a successful Contact Center Manager, you need to be a leader. A Manager does not only manage Advisors through tasks, they also lead and manage beliefs and perceptions regarding working at the contact center.

So, make sure you relay messages about your beliefs and values within the contact center’s team – both verbally and practically, on a daily regular level. The power of managerial leadership is much higher than the power of formal authority.

To be a leader, walk the contact center floor, engage with Advisors as they work and communicate with the whole team. Speak the values that you want to inspire.

What does Inspiration Mean in a Contact Center Context?

There are all kinds of definitions of inspiration. Here are three definitions that are best applied to the contact center:

1. Someone or something which give us ideas for action
2. A sudden idea/thought/insight which “dawns” on us
3. Someone who we appreciate and wish to resemble to

The Three Practical Ways of Inspiring Advisors

Below are three key ideas for how you can provide inspiration to contact center Advisors.

Along with each idea is practical suggestions for how implement in the contact center.

1. Encourage and Establish ‘Positive Self-Esteem’

Communicate the value of positive self-esteem with Advisors. The greater the self-esteem, both on an individual and team level, the more positivity is generated. This helps to improve Advisor activity and their ability to confront complex situations.

I am sure you know people in your lives who radiate ‘positive energy’, who doesn’t want to be around them? This is exactly how you want to meet your Advisors every day. This is how you want them to come across to customers and this is how you want the entire organisation to be perceived.

Below are three key ideas for how you can provide inspiration to contact center Advisors.

How Can You Establish Positive Self-Esteem?

Here are four quick tips on you can encourage greater self-esteem in the contact center.

• Start the day with an expression of appreciation and recognition to one or all of the team members together for the previous day. Even if it is not simple and even if you are not meeting your targets, this can provide a nice boost to morale. Find the one thing for which you can strengthen and thereby empower the team.
• Make sure to use the “Yes Language”. Think about what can be done and what is possible. Even though reality is often complex and restrictive: “Yes – we can!”
• Encourage your team to share happy and positive events in their lives – at work and in general.
• Give a personal example – value yourselves, yes, yes, yourselves! Share a significant achievement in the contact center or a happy event which happened to you. You will start and they will continue.

2. Focus on Internal Motivation Factors

It is true that the team are all happy with a motivation plan which includes a financial bonus? It seems clear to all of us that the effect of such a bonus is translated into results in the contact center’s performance, right?

Along with each idea is practical suggestions for how implement in the contact center.

Perhaps not.

Inspiration by financial compensation and external motives has limits – motivation needs to be intrinsic, otherwise you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons. This is a point that Martin Hill Wilson makes in the article “The New Rules of Customer Service” – “stop motivation by chocolate” as he so eloquently puts it.

So, inspiration should ideally stem from organisational culture. This means focusing strong contact center values, Advisor development and good relations. These all have great importance in creating a goal and motivating values.

How do you Build Internal Motivation?

Creating an organisational culture, from which internal motivation stems, is easier said than done. It takes time. But, here are five practical ideas to get the ball rolling.

• Define the contact center’s values (it is recommended to do that together with the team) and make sure that they are visible on contact center walls and, more importantly, in practise.
• Hold enrichment gatherings, even outside working hours. Expose your team to an array of topics which will broaden their knowledge, not necessarily directly related to their work at the contact center.
• Show mutual respect. In any condition and at any situation. This is something which should always be ensured.
• Identify those who need time off and suggest a vacation, while focusing on their personal needs and addressing them directly and empathetically.
• Ensure open and authentic communication. There is really nothing to conceal nor any reason to fake anything.

3. Show Passion for What you do

Your team, just like you, and actually, like all of us, strive to create a sense of enthusiasm and importance about their work. Naturally, you want to harness this productivity.

A Manager who consistently shares his workload/frustration with the rest of the team, is definitely not an inspiring Manager.

Instead, be an example for enthusiasm of your action in the contact center. Show your team that you love what you do. That despite all of the workload you are passionate in your daily activity.

Having this enthusiasm is much more infectious and it also sets a material reminder to your team about what they are doing and why.

How can you Show Passion to Build Enthusiasm?

It’s easy to say that you’re passionate about what you do. However, it’s another thing to show it.

Here are five practical ways to share your enthusiasm with the team.

• Share the achievements of the contact center on a regular basis, as well as the focused and significant activity which led to the success of the entire organisation.
• Share success stories of Advisors who made progress in the contact center and in the company in general.
• Share success stories of support and service provision to customers.
• Share success stories of the entire organisation – impressive achievements and past and current success stories.
• Share your success stories – as a Manager and the positive stories that enabled you to reach your position.

In Summary

“Be inspirational!” This sounds a little vague, unclear and abstract, but there are ways to implement this concept on the contact center’s floor.

Try the ideas which that have been put forward in this article and hopefully the positive results will appear quickly.

Orit Avital, General Manager at Ottorita, discusses the importance of managing managers in the contact center to improve performance. 

Managing a contact center is a complex task that encompasses many types of management. Apart from advisors, you need to monitor the impact of team leaders, shift supervisors, managers, trainers and knowledge managers etc. on overall performance. The management task itself requires you to have skills of “manager management”. 

Moreover, in many contact centers, the intermediate management team (whether task or people managers) were likely promoted from other areas of the contact center and have little other experience of management. So, the task of managing managers is not trivial. 

How Can We Better Support Managers?

In order to better manage managers, we must, amongst other things, have good mentoring and development skills, authority delegation, high level of interpersonal communication etc. 

While some of you may already have these skills, it is good practise to create routines that allow us to expand on them and improve contact center performance. 

These routines will also have the aim of making the complex task of manager management easier for you and they will provide you with practical tools for the advancement and development of the management team reporting to you.

A strong management team provides the basis for  a strong contact center. So, here are five routines that will help to better support your contact center managers.  

1. The Daily Brief 

Do not let a day go by without a meeting with all of your management team. These aren’t supposed to be long meetings, but a timeframe of 15 minutes is ideal, at the start of each day. 

In this time, managers can share the progress of any of their initiatives, their planned itinerary and best practices with one another. This will keep everyone up to speed with each area of the contact center and help to create a community feel. 

The daily brief also provides an excellent opportunity to exercise one of the most important management principles in the management of managers – transparency. 

Share the irregular issues with them, on the level of your schedule and burning issues which have not reached them yet. Together you can create a plan, across all departments, which will help to eradicate these niggling issues. 

2. Come With Solutions, Not Just Problems 

Every time that any one of your management team approaches you, you may know that they have a question or they want to describe a problem which they need a solution for. Well, not every time, but most of the time, right? 

In the management of mangers, you must ensure the development of their independence – their ability to make decisions and constantly see the big picture. 

For that purpose, adopt a procedure – with every problem, the manager must approach you with one or more solutions that they had thought of themselves. Even if the solution is incomplete or totally inadequate, listen, respond and move forward to the practical part. This approach will subtly remind them that they are part of the management team and therefore they are also responsible for finding the solution.

With proper and consistent adaptation of your messages, you will likely discover that your managers become more independent and confident in the execution of their managerial tasks. An important and good result.  

3. Be Wary of Micromanagement

Often, managers in the contact centers have a tendency to break down tasks by assigning little parts of each task to different people in the team. This means that besides being an executional arm, the manager has little room left for any thought or involvement in the decision making. 

There are tasks that do have to be approached in this manner, which require you to go in to the smallest details. However, not all tasks are like that.

Micromanagement could leave your managerial team without real significance in their activity, preventing their professional growth and thwarting the development of their leadership skills. 

So, when charged with a new tasks and a manager may consider delegating parts of that task, ask your managers; “Which decisions do you need to take control of?” 

By asking managers to think like this will help them to think over the practicalities of management and engage with their previous experiences. This requires managerial courage, however, the gain in strengthening the managerial team is invaluably higher. 

4. Feedback Is a Must 

You have implemented a great way of harnessing customer and advisor feedback in your contact center. However, many contact center managers forget that the managerial team reporting to them also need feedback and mentoring. 

Two of the most important skills required from those who manage managers are mentoring and training skills. 

Do you want to be good managers’ managers? Ensure that you have a feedback routine (regularly and on-the-go) and coach managers with this information, while providing positive emphases, as well as points for improvement. 

Look at areas such as the manner of briefing, the conversations they are having with their people, the areas in which performance levels are changing and so on, to give your feedback. 

Real coaching and effective manager development require you to provide promotional feedback on a regular basis – make this your routine.

5. Regular Managers’ Meetings

We often come across statements such as; “I see them all the time and they can talk to us any time – we do not need a meeting”, or; “we are together all the time, what is there left to talk about?” Sounds familiar? 

Whether yes or no, it is important to emphasise – one of the main purposes of a regular managers’ meeting (the one which is not routinely cancelled or forgotten) is to focus all of the managerial team on the main issues on the agenda. 

Within the regular commotion of managing the contact center, we all think we know what is necessary and how little time we may have for conversation and sharing. However, setting time aside for this will allow you to deeply understand your managers’ situation, provide supportive tools and practical solutions, and remined them that they are not alone. They are part of a team and everyone has the same goal. 

In Summary

It is important to understand that manager management is a task of its own merit, which requires you to develop your skills. 

Whenever we talk about skills development, creating routines will not come far behind as they are mechanisms that help us to continuously improve. 

So, encourage solution based thinking, guard against micromanagement and encourage conversation and sharing, as these are all things that will help managers to think for themselves and improve overall contact center performance further. 

What else can you do? Read a book on the issue of management, listen to a lecture, find methods to improve your practical capabilities in managers’ management – learn the issue in depth and you will likely discover that the results will not be far behind. 

Good luck!

Orit Avital, General Manager at Ottorita, shares her advice on how to best support Team Leaders when managing Contact Center Advisors.

A key role of the Team Leader is boosting Advisor happiness. It is the duty of the Team Leader to lead professional development processes for Advisors, support them during calls, maintain their motivation level and their connection to the contact center etc.

A Manager who fails to notice this and doesn’t invest time in the development of these Team Leader skills, will be unable to create a positive culture in their contact center. This will damage the quality of service that is given to customers, while it may also create problems in terms of attrition and absenteeism.

Therefore, Contact Center Managers must recognise the importance of the Team Leader and invest time in the development of their personal skills, to help spread a good culture.

So, let’s take a look at what messages should be passed down to Team Leaders, so they can best influence Advisor performance and happiness.

Messages to Pass onto Team Leaders

Here are four key messages that your Contact Center Managers should (hopefully) be already passing onto their Team Leaders.

“Be Prepared to Have Difficult Conversations”

Avoidance and disregard of difficult conversations with an Advisor, will quite possibly escalate into a severe issue, which demands an even more complex “confrontation”.

Don’t keep shy of “confrontations”, prepare for them. Use these conversations for learning and drawing conclusions for how you could better handle such an issue in the future.

“Treat Each Member of the Team as Equals”

You are bound to have more personal chemistry with some of the Advisors than others. But, there is no room for favouritism.

It is very important to ask yourself; am I providing each Advisor with all of the tools that I can provide them with? Am I choosing to give certain individuals less or more of my time and effort than others?

This is an ethical approach and, by following this, Advisor Satisfaction – which is being deemed an increasingly important contact center metric – can be kept stable.

“Create a Team Feedback Loop”

After every interaction with an Advisor, make sure that you respond with feedback. (BQ) Whether this is “praising” or “correcting” feedback, both are useful for the Advisor to fulfil their duties.

Feedback loops are essential for your success, so use feedback frequently and on a routine basis. Not only does this apply to scheduled quality/coaching sessions, but to ad-hoc conversations also.

“Get to Know Your Advisors Personally”

Think about these questions on an individual level:

• What are your Advisors like?
• What is important to them?
• What is their professional and personal background?

Use this knowledge towards each Advisor’s regular management and contact center involvement. Make use of an Advisors hobbies in the contact center to strengthen their bond with their job.

For example, if the contact center wants to redesign its walls and you know of an Advisor who likes painting, why not asking them for a creative contribution?  

Activities That Can Help Improve a Team Leader’s Skillset

While you – as the Contact Center Manager – would like to think so, just giving Team Leaders messages, like the four above, will not be enough. Time investments into their developing skillsets are also important.

Here are five activities that will be useful to help assess Team Leader performance and help them to progress their skills.

Give Team Leaders a Contact Center Wide Project  

Give Team Leaders responsibility for an activity or project on the entire contact center level. This can be through something as simple as running a campaign to improve healthy eating, recycling or so on.

By doing this, you will be able to view and perceive their decision-making processes and greater involve them in wider contact center operations.

Ask Team Leaders to Find a Daily “Positive Point”

Ask Team Leaders to come to you once a day and feedback a positive message regarding one of their team’s Advisors. This can be in terms of performance, good customer feedback, job satisfaction or so on.

Having this daily “positive point” will encourage Team Leaders to greater focus on the performance of their Advisors and their happiness within the role.

Also, asking the Team Leader to feedback this “positive point” to the Advisor, as well as yourself, may be a good idea, to ensure that they feel valued and that their hard work has been recognised.

Make Sure Team Leaders Create Activities for Their Teams

Make certain that Team Leaders are holding activities for their teams. These activities should ideally be fun and have the purpose of improving performance.  

Ideas could include contact center related motivational games, knowledge quizzes and team building activities.

By doing this, you can emphasise the importance of Advisor happiness and team cohesion. If your team are all happy and friendly, managing them becomes a whole lot easier.  

Hold Learning Meetings Between Team Leaders

Holding regular meetings where Team Leaders present actions, which they initiated on the team level, to one another. This will help spread best practices across the contact center. (BQ)

In turn, this will also encourage Team Leader innovation and allow them the space for their development. Also, it will enhance your message regarding the importance of their role.

Give Team Leaders Enough Time on the Floor

This final point isn’t so much an activity for the Team Leader but one for you. Allow them the space to be on the floor with Advisors during the shift, listen to conversations, provide Advisors with support and just be involved.

By doing this, you’ll get Team Leaders engaged with their primary duty – the ongoing management of the contact center’s Advisors.

Too often in contact centers, when work builds up, Team Leaders choose to reduce the amount of time they spend on the floor. So, look for other areas (such as time spent on emails) where time can be reduced.

Summary

Management of Team Leaders is one of the primary tasks of every Contact Center Manager. So, finding practical ways of helping them to support Advisors should be integrated into the daily schedule of every Manager.

The activities listed above will help to develop Team Leaders and encourage them to build a positive culture, while the messages – which should come directly from the Manager – will also hold them in good stead.

I hope that you find some of these ideas practical, useful and effective. Good luck! 

There are many similarities between retaining advisors and customers. They are indeed defined as two separate challenges, but in practice, they are often reflected in one another.

With this is mind, Orit Avital – General Manager of Ottorita – introduces five common service tools that are often used by contact centers for customer retention, before discussing how each tool can also be used to help reduce advisor turn-over. 

1. Retention is a Matter of Timing – Keeping a Strict Response Time

When service levels decrease, and the real-time screen starts flickering with warning lights, the entire management team on the floor goes into action mode. 

In most contact centers, reducing long queue times for customers is primary to everything else. This is because long waits usually result in customer dissatisfaction and complaints from those who remained in the queue and did not abandon. 

Long wait times = dissatisfied customers, is an equation that is very clear to us all. 

How is This Related to Advisor Retention?

It is important to understand that this equation works for advisor queries as well. So, be sure to provide contact center advisors with a response to their requests within reasonable time. This of course refers to both personal and professional requests. 

In order to retain an advisor and prevent dissatisfaction, which ultimately leads to abandonment, you must provide a quick and available managerial, personal and professional response. 

Just as with customers, an advisor who feels that they have no professional response and that their requests are unattended, will grow frustrated and the chance of churn will grow. 

Answer Advisor Requests Quickly

Define an internal objective, an Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the managerial team, for handling advisors’ requests. 

For example, for a personal vacation request, a Team Manager or a Contact Center Manager must reply within 72 hours. 

Once the handling of the advisors’ requests will be regulated and structured, it will be much easier to coordinate advisor expectations.

Also, the wait will be perceived as shorter and the uncertainty therein will be reduced. Accordingly, the retention rate will likely increase.

2. Retention is Enabled When Customer Satisfaction is High 

A satisfied customer, that is the ultimate goal of every contact center and extensive effort is invested in the measurement and monitoring of customer satisfaction. 

The abundance of possibilities for measuring satisfaction even includes innovative technologies for carrying out interactive and user- friendly satisfaction surveys through various media channels.

All of the possibilities are used for optimal reflection of customer satisfaction level.

How is This Related to Advisor Retention?

The satisfaction of the contact center team fluctuates exactly in the same manner as the customer satisfaction. Therefore, the measurement of customer satisfaction is carried out in many contact centers after every call. 

Yet, in a large number of contact centers, advisor satisfaction is only measured once a year, together with the entire organisation. 

It is high time to take a different approach to this issue. To understand the importance of remaining attentive to advisors satisfaction also.

Create Regular Employee Surveys Using Your Customer Survey Tools

Take the technology you use for customer satisfaction measurement and create a satisfaction survey for advisors, which will be referred back to in predefined intervals. 

Try carrying out a satisfaction survey using a non-calendar segmentation – as is done in many modern contact centers. Instead, use satisfaction surveys for advisors in accordance with to their tenure, i.e. after each three months of working.

In addition to the value of the survey results for advisor retention, the carrying out of such a survey in the contact center constitutes a significant message to the entire team. This is the message that: “We care how you feel, we care about your situation and we are putting effort for the benefit of your retention at every stage.”

3. Distinct Retention is Carried Out at the Complaint Crossroads – Address Complaints Thoroughly

Complaining customers are our good customers. They provide us with an opportunity to correct our mistakes. When a customer makes a complaint, what needs to be done to ensure retention becomes clearer.  

In order to create as many opportunities for retention as possible, many contact centers create varied channels for relaying complaints and are also meticulous in creating procedures for how to correctly handle a complaint. 

Handling a complaint is usually done with transparency and in a manner that the customer feels that their complaint is being taken seriously. The customer is treated with respect and a satisfactory solution is found for them, sometimes involving some sort of compensation.

How is This Related to Advisor Retention?

Your advisors also complain, this is clear and natural. Do not forget that they too, like you, are customers. But in practice, contrary to the methodic and serious manner in which customer complaints are handled, advisor complaints are usually handled on an informal level. 

Yet, there is room to create a structured process for handling advisor complaints, in the same manner as customer complaints are handled. 

Seriousness and affirming the importance of advisor retention at the complaint crossroads, is significant and directly influences employee churn rates. 

Create a Clear Platform for Advisor Complaints 

Create a clear and convenient platform for forwarding advisors’ complaints in the contact center and then make sure to inform the entire team of the process.

Ideally, the advisors’ complaints will be first forwarded to their direct manager. If this does not happen, it is important to check why. This could be another problem that needs to be addressed. 

Furthermore, define a responsible person who coordinates and thoroughly investigates the nature of the complaints. You will be surprised to find out how many things your advisors hold back because they were not provided with the appropriate platform to raise their complaints. 

It can be little things which were not said, until this platform was introduced, which possibly led to abandonment and could be solved with the necessary seriousness and promptness.

4. Retention Through Personalisation and Personal Tailoring – a Tailored Response Makes the Difference

One of the main trends integrated into service providing organisations in recent years is the personal service. 

The guiding principle of this trend is that the organisation has varied customers with varying needs and preferences. Thus, personal adaptations are made for every customer in the offering of services, promotions and benefits, as well as in the nature of care. 

All of these extensively contribute to customer retention. The customer feels and understands that their needs are being noticed and that constant and ongoing effort is made to satisfy them personally. And, that works!

How is This Related to Advisor Retention?

Well, the guiding principle is identical. Despite the characteristics common to the entire team, we can find diversity of characteristics of the team members in every contact center. 

The contact center has advisors of different backgrounds, different sectors, different ages, different aspirations and preferences. Therefore, each advisor has different needs. 

Retaining advisors through a personal managerial response adapted to them is a challenge, just as it is with customers, but it is worth the effort.

Sit with Your Team Leaders and Discuss Their Advisors 

Warning! The following tool requires thorough acquaintance with your team and investment in the provision of personal care. 

Firstly, sit with your Team Leaders and review the characteristics of their advisors with them. Then, for every advisor, ask the following three questions:

• Where are they in terms of performance level?
• What is their level of satisfaction and what bothers them?
• What is important for them within the work at the contact center?

This conversation can focus you on the methods required for providing a tailored response for each individual advisor. 

From here, get on your way and find solutions that can provide a response to the needs of the various advisors. 

The managerial perception, which deems the entire team to be a uniform workforce that requires an identical managerial response, is no longer valid. Your advisors are not only a workforce, they are much more than that, and, in order to retain them, it is important to study in depth who they are and what is important to them and how, by implementing creative methods, you can satisfy them. 

Also, it is important to remember that diversity in the managerial response does not indicate improper management! For as long as it is carried out fairly, honestly and is consistent with the reciprocal relations between the advisor, their performance and satisfaction level – trust yourselves!

  5. Retention Processes are Proactive Processes – be the Initiators, Always!

In recent years, many initiated actions were integrated in many contact centers for the benefit of retaining customers. 

Many companies do not wait any more for their customers to contact, in order to take care of them, but create proactive communications and processes which originate in the contact center. These communications are across multiple channels and remind the customer that they are important to the organisation. 

There is an abundance of examples for that. For example, updating customers on new service processes and products, training and support tools, as well as greetings for personal occasions. 

The initiated activity, if carried out properly, creates the “wow effect” and contributes to customer retention.

Initiated activity is actually preventive activity intended to maintain high level of satisfaction and tighten the connection between the organisation’s customers and the organisation itself.

How is This Related to Advisor Retention?

Do not wait for a complaint, an uprising or even a wave of abandonment to handle and examine the retention processes. Instead, provide the team with a working environment in which actions are carried out on a regular basis, for their retention and satisfaction.

Create a Plan for the Next Half Year 

Schedule a managers’ meeting and sit with a calendar, in order to prepare a proactive plan for the coming half year. 

Mark various dates on which there are holidays, advisors’ birthdays, high and low times for the contact center activity, and think in advance of creative ideas for marking these events in a fun and surprising manner. 

For example, you could decorate the contact center, offer holiday gifts, greeting cards, little presents, food, workshops, contact center team-building activities, outings and so on. 

While, most importantly, try to be original. Granted, recurring initiatives are also important, but prove to your advisors that you invested thought in the creation of the unique twist for your contact center!

In Summary

As a final recommendation, why not try putting together other tools which you use for the customer retention and examining how they can be implemented also for advisor retention processes.

Remember that there is a feedback relation between customer retention and advisor retention, so take a look at your current processes to ensure that you are not missing a trick. 

Be sure that the investment in customer retention is reflected in your ability to retain the company’s advisors, especially those who are so pivotal to your contact center’s make-up. 

Good luck!

Orit Avital presents ten messages to share with the team that will help to improve managerial resourcefulness.

1. “Instead of telling me what’s impossible, tell me what’s possible”

As Steve Jobs once famously said: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

So, instead of having to create the solution on your own, with middle managers telling you want you can’t do, ask them to come to you with the solutions. This way you can choose the best way forward from an assortment of options.

But, this doesn’t just go for manager and middle managers, advisors need to have a voice too. They are the people who speak to their customers and giving them a voice in any procedure changes will not only add value, but it will also greater engage them with the chosen solution.

2. “Metrics are only the measure, focus on improving processes and not the maths directly.”

Often, in managerial meetings, discussing metric results can take up too much talk time. Remember, these are only numerical results that give us little in the way of information for how to improve them.

So, there needs to be some sort of research behind them. We should only be measuring metrics that give us insight into how performance has been influenced by our various strategies.

These strategies should not be directly designed to improve metrics, but to improve the experience that we create for customers. Otherwise, we may lose sight of the customer behind the measures and do things that could damage their happiness.

3. “Problems always seem to reach you or me, let’s see how we can develop resourcefulness throughout the team.”

Contact center advisors often have problems that are escalated to middle managers to resolve, taking up valuable time.

Classic examples include:

• Requests for shift-swaps
• Gaps in the knowledge base
• One-off customer queries, which they need support with

So, we need to think about how advisors can help each other to solve these issues amongst themselves, instead of having matters passed up to us, filling up our inbox and disengaging us from other pressing matters.

One way to do this is do create a community group, which has a forum where advisors can answer each other’s issues and can easily be monitored. Just make sure advisors are a key part of the creation of the group, to ensure their buy-in.

4. “I hope that next time we face overload, as we recently were, we will already be prepared with Standards Operating Procedures (SOPs)”

Being resourceful means learning from our mistakes. So, if your contact center has recently experienced an overload of contact volumes, you need to ask yourself and your team:

1. How can we prevent this happening again?
2. How can we better prepare in the future?

Firstly, get to the root cause of the issue; did marketing send out a new promotion that you weren’t warned about? Was there a mistake with your forecasts?

Then, think of prevention ideas, remembering that if the fault lies with another department to try and forge better relationships, showing them the consequences of the miscommunication.

But, we all know that unexpected peaks in contact volumes isn’t a unique situation. So, learn from your mistakes by creating SOPs, which dictate the steps that should be taken in these difficult circumstances – to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

5. “Changes in industry regulations and organisational goals shall continue to occur, it cannot lead to a crisis every time.”

Solutions almost never come from above, but changes in organisational goals and industry regulations do – so it cannot lead to a blind panic every time we are tasked with a new project, without clear guidelines.

To avoid this, start by putting together the right team, people who you know will work together well and whose personalities best fit the task.

Then, start documenting what is required of you, reminding ourselves that any changes that we make to our plan should be in light of these key goals.

Creating a realistic schedule is a good next step, including key milestones and highlighting potential problems that you may meet when rolling out the plan on the contact center floor.

At this point, it is good to get advisors involved to ensure they buy-into your new plans.

6. “Always look for the broad picture when decision making, ensure that we’re not creating more problems for ourselves.”

I’m sure that you, as a Contact Center Manager, have experienced a time where one change to a key process has led to an unforeseen chain of problematic events.

So, we need to think 360. This firstly involves sharing your ideas with someone who has had nothing to do with the creation of the idea and simply asking them to think any of negative consequences that could occur.

We must also consider how our change will impact each major contact center department (i.e. Resource Planning), the advisors and, of course, the customers. 

7. “Try not to come to me with requests for new solutions, come to me with proposals.”

The  Contact Center Manager will often deal with suggestions and requests for new technologies, but proposals are different, they carry more value.

To create a business case, you, as the Manager, will have to define the contact centers pain points, while calculating an estimated ROI for the proposed solution and compare that with the cost of doing nothing. Even then, there is no guarantee for securing the budget.

So, plead your case for a solution. Do your research and be innovative when creating the proposal. For example, you could create a video where contact center advisors demonstrate how the solution will make their lives easier and bring your case to light!

8. “Let’s learn from our failures, to understand where we went wrong and understand how we can avoid the same mistakes.”

It is important to reflect upon initiatives that weren’t successful and ask yourself; why? This will help you to determine how you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Ask yourself the difficult questions, and for each mistake that you realise you’ve made, create a list of reasons for why you shouldn’t make that mistake again. 

Equally, we also need to celebrate with the whole team when we do meet our successes. This will encourage the team to continue to work hard to adopt our future initiatives.

9. “In meetings, let’s not just discuss problems, we should instead bring ideas for development for the year ahead.”

To provide the best possible support, you need middle managers to lead and while discussing problems is key to restoring the status quo, meetings also need to include longer-term development discussions.

Moving beyond the firefighting of the contact center is the only way that we can plan ahead and remove future obstacles from our path.

To do this, we have to investigate whether we are being efficient enough with our resources, where customer dissatisfaction is coming from and, on larger scale, think about how we can increase our strategic value to the organisation.

10. “Think about how your teams can do better adapt to new contact center processes or changes in organisational goals.”

For a new procedure to be a success, it is important that everyone is invested in your plans. So, to start with, advisors need to be involved in the plan’s creation. Getting feedback from every level of the contact center is good practice.

Each different point of view that you gather can help you to understand what will happen next and will help to structure your plan, to avoid any concerns that the team may have.

Then, once the new process has been “rolled-out”, continue to listen to your team and make changes if requested, ensuring that you can still achieve your desired outcomes with the change.

How Can These Messages Improve Managerial Resourcefulness?

Resourcefulness is a key managerial skill, as a resourceful person is someone who knows how to solve problems and overcome difficult situations.

In fact, it is a skill through which managers efficiently (in the best manner) and effectively (with the best result) cope with problems and unexpected situations at the contact center.

Resourceful people will also know how to:

• Identify difficult situations – you will also need to know how to avoid “shaking” or “waking” them
• Demonstrate levelheadedness – not to respond with hysteria and helplessness in the initial understanding of the situation
• Find possible methods of handling the problem – propose high quality beneficial ways of coping
• Find necessary change processes for prevention of the reappearance of the problem – you will understand the problem in depth so that they can act to deal with its origin

Setting clear expectations is key and these come from clear and accessible messages that set the expectance for managerial resourcefulness. The ten messages above are great examples!

In Summary

Once you have identified you Key Performance Areas (KPAs) in which you would like the contact center to improve, you need to make plans for improving in these areas – making resourcefulness a key skill.

Managerial resourcefulness is one of the essential managerial skills for development among various management levels, in terms of personal and contact center development, as it allows you to effectively problem solve.

In order to improve your resourcefulness, you need to set clear expectations, which you can do by sharing the ten messages above with your managerial team.

Orit Avital, General Manager at Ottorita, suggests three routines that managers should add to their schedules to continuously improve contact center performance.

Contact center managers get up for work every morning and they will supposedly know what their day looks like. In practice however, there are always surprises.

Contact center management routines are essential for running an efficient and effective operation.

Yet, for most of you, a routine is a blessed reality.

“A Routine Day In the Contact Center”

The statement “a routine day at the contact center” usually reflects a day in which everything happens, including unexpected events which you suddenly find out about through the customers. There are also situations which require reconsideration of decisions, constant risk management and so forth.

In most contact centers, this is what routine looks like!

If you love your job, it will likely be thanks to these characteristics – the pressure, the energy and the need to always keep your finger on the pulse. Yet, there will be moments when it feels too much.

The Three Improvements

Each of the following ideas are accompanied by a common sentence, which you may have heard from your team, in order to emphasise the benefit of implementing each routine.

Also, remember that a routine is a routine, so these ideas need to be implemented on a full-time basis in order for the contact center to realise the full benefits.

1. Develop an “Unplanned Routine”

“You cannot really manage a schedule with all of these unplanned occurrences”

Is that so?! Yes, there are many unplanned events and situations that are impossible to prepare for. Some of which you have already experienced enough to foresee in advance, while others manage to surprise you time and again.

When this is the case, tasks are postponed from one day to the next and there is already a pile of those which you have forgotten about and that you need to deal with… sound familiar?

So, how can you introduce a routine that will help better prepare you for the unforeseen issues? The answer is to schedule times in your day, preferably around peak hours, to fire-fight, i.e. create an “unplanned routine”.

How to Best Implement an “Unpanned Routine”

Implementing an unplanned routine indicates that you recognise the fact that your schedule must be flexible enough to be able to meet all of the management tasks.

If you have not been working with an organised schedule up to now, it is definitely time to start. And, if you have been, but you still find it hard to meet all of the time-limited tasks, this is the routine for you.

An unplanned routine in the management of the contact center, is a routine which includes fixed timeslots in the schedule during which you do not perform any predetermined tasks, but are free to cope with the ongoing events.

Remember, this is not time for e-mails, nor is it time for meetings. Instead, this is the regular time during which most of the problems usually arise, and you, without knowing what the issue is, are ready, free and available to provide a managerial response.

But, how can you practically go about creating an unplanned routine? Here are four steps that will help you do so.

Step 1 – Examine what are the main peak hours during the day when you are most frequently approached. Once you know this, define the periods of time in your schedule for which you plan to firefight.

Step 2 – Manage your calendar such that these hours will be blocked and you cannot be invited to a meeting during those hours.

Step 3 – We recommend to also talk to your direct manager (i.e. your boss) and explain that these are times in which your presence in various meetings comes at the expense of the contact center’s operation, and therefore should be avoided as much as possible.

Step 4 – During the time-slots which you determined, go around the contact center – be on the floor! Things will reach you already before the fire breaks out! Give an immediate response, follow-up on the team’s functioning and make sure that the managerial team reporting to you indeed meets all of its tasks.

In other words, make “the unplanned” a routine! Thus, you will slowly be able to reduce all of these cases which suddenly arrive and require special, complex and lengthy treatment.

By doing so, you will also make clear to the rest of the team when you are not available – meaning that you can go about your other tasks without the risk of distraction.

2. Implement an Open-Door Routine

“This is how it is, whoever shouts loudest gets attention first”

Is that so?! We know that the natural tendency of managers at the contact centers is to seek the fire and act to extinguish it as soon as possible, this is part of the daily reality. However, there are situations in which the immediate response generates more harm than benefit.

By implementing an open door policy in your contact center, you can proactively engage with the team and promote two-way communication, as everyone feels confident coming forward with their questions.

How to Best Implement an Open-Door Routine

An open-door routine is part of a management policy that allows the contact center team to transparently approach the management team and the contact center manager as they wish.

Usually, this expression is uttered by many managers, however, in practice, when you are in between meetings and gatherings, briefings and analyses – do you really have time and availability for the advisors?

When you do talk to an advisor, do not allow it to happen after a “drama” in the contact center, as the message relayed to the entire team is that indeed – “this is how it is, whoever shouts loudest, gets attention first”.

In order to genuinely make the open-door routine, so that it is not impacted by “drama management” throughout the day, here are a few ideas to help with your implementation.

Set regular and routine open door days – While the effectiveness of this option will depend on the size of the contact center, the dates should be consistent with a day of the week with lower than average contact volumes, so that the advisors can really use it and you can be available to listen.

Issue an official email and notice – This issue can be sent to each member of the team regarding the next day and hours during which your office door will really be open and wait for them.

Define time-slots of 15-20 minutes – Is the contact center team too large to allow everyone to arrive at the same time? Ask advisors, through the team leaders, to email in advance and book a time, keeping this issue under control.

If you already have an open door policy (and stick by it!) consider asking all senior managers to go out and speak to a member of the team that they would not usually speak with at the start of every day.

This can be a great way of boosting team cohesion.

3. Create a Control and Monitoring Routine

“A new procedure is issued here every day, they will probably forget about it tomorrow”

Is that so?! These kinds of statements are not expressed only by advisors. Many managers, at different levels, can empathise with this statement and use it often.

You sat down, gave it thought, planned it and brought a procedure to the floor, aiming to develop and promote the work processes at the contact center. Only a few know of the work behind the scenes – the time, energy and thought invested. Most people know a “new procedure” and that is where it ends.

The procedure is provided to the team during the briefing and therefrom, it often dissipates into the current operations, the routine. Sound familiar?

If this does indeed sound familiar, it is likely that you need to set aside time to routinely control and monitor new procedures to ensure that the contact center is continuously improving.

How to Implement a Control and Monitoring Routine

Learn from the experience of many managers who extensively invest in the building of work processes and eventually see no use of them in the current operations.

Attribute the appropriate respect to your resource investment and fulfil a significant part of your role in the contact center management by consistently performing control as a routine.

That is easier said than done, right? To help, here are four steps to help you on you way.

Step 1 – Upon the introduction of a new procedure to the floor, ask a team leader or a senior advisor, who may want a little more responsibility, to provide you with a quick update of the impact it’s having on the contact center floor.

Step 2 – Do not stop there! Define the desired results which you will follow-up – be as accurate and clear as possible. Refining the desired result will help the entire team to get on board for the benefit of actual implementation.

Step 3 – Set regular times in the schedule for control. During these times, stop everything and make sure the procedure is indeed being implemented on the floor, according to the results that you defined.

Step 4 – Speak to the team and gather their thoughts on the procedure, even in an incidental conversation. Keep your finger on the pulse, that is a key duty of every manager.

Many contact center managers have been promoted from other positions within the contact center and will carry on by following the lead of their predecessor and be drawn into constant “fire-fighting”.

However, implementing new processes is key to the contact center’s progress, and to some extent the wider organisation’s growth. So, it’s important to set aside routine times to but all of your focus on ensuring these procedures are implement to the best possible standard.

In Summary

The management of a contact center manager includes many routines which we implement for the continuing benefit of everyone in the contact center.

Not all of these routines are simple to implement, but they help to ensure advisors are engaged and that our schedules are flexible enough so that the contact center continuously improves.

While you may already have implemented at least one of these routines into the contact center, let’s hope there’s something here for you to put into action tomorrow morning.

Good Luck!

Orit Avital explains the basics of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) before introducing us to KPAs (Key Performance Areas).

What are Contact Center KPIs?

In the contact center, we implement and assess the results of a number of different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to attain a picture of how well our operation is performing.

We can KPIs can be split into three separate categories:

Real-Time KPIs (e.g. Service Level) – These KPIs provide an immediate view into the demand of the contact center and they are important to track to ensure contact volumes are under control and that resources are being well utilised.

Historical KPIs (e.g. Forecast Accuracy) – These KPIs provide historical data that helps the contact center to better plan for the future, so they can better prepare for future demand.

Customer KPIs (e.g. Customer Satisfaction) – These KPIs create a picture of how well-received your service is by your customers.

Each category of KPIs will likely compromise of a combination of indicators that are relatively simple to measure. However, there are more complex KPIs that you can measure, depending on the technology at your disposal.

For example, with a speech analytics system, you can measure emotion through sentiment analysis. But, we need to remember that we shouldn’t measure something just because we have the tools to do so.

We decide on the KPIs we measure through the assessment of those that are directly and closely connected to the broader organisation strategy. These KPIs then assist us in quantifying how well we are doing in terms of fulfilling this strategy.

However, KPIs are only indicators – they should not become an objective, as if we just focus on improving a KPI, we are not concentrating on what we are doing to better that score and whether its in the customers best interests.

The Three Golden Rules of Using Contact Center KPIs

As Contact Center Managers, setting targets, understanding their underlying significance and methods of implementation, are highly important.

With this in mind, here are three golden rules that we need to remember when using KPIs in the contact center.

1. KPIs are measured with respect to a predefined set of targets.
2. They must be structured and selected methodically and thoroughly, with a direct and close connection to the broad organisational strategy.
3. Identify which measures can be taken down to an individual level, as this may help to identify any leading/weak components in the operational chain of performance. Also, using customer metrics at the advisor level will help you to identify individuals that deserve reward and recognition.

A List of Contact Center KPIs

Below is a list of contact center KPIs, split into three categories; real-time KPIs, historical KPIs and customer KPIs – some of which may appear in multiple categories, as they have more than one function.

For example, it is important to measure your historical abandon rate for WFM processes and it’s good to measure in real-time as it can add perspective to a declining service level.

There are also channel specific metrics that we haven’t included in this list. For example, for live chat you could also monitor the following KPIs:

• Number of Chats Queuing
• Number of Elevations
• Number of Concurrent Chats
• Chat Engagement
• Number of Chats Handled
• Average Number of Chats
• Pop-up Acceptance Rate

What Are KPAs?

Up until now, we have discussed how KPIs are an indicator of success. These indicators help us to define primary areas in which development is required to reach “success” – otherwise known as Key Performance Areas (KPAs).

So, while KPIs direct managers and advisors to an expected performance level, in terms of numerical values, KPA refers to other fields for development, where we do not have enough tools and/or knowledge in order to set a numerical target for a result.

With this in mind, one way to think of KPAs is that they are the areas for development which our KPIs have alerted us to.

The Four Keys of Contact Center KPAs

1. KPA allows/requires us to – for both the individual and the team (depending on the managerial level) – to aim for excellence, broader objectives and significant breakthroughs.
2. KPA allows us to define areas in which progress is important for the upcoming year, even if they do not include a tangible target to be set.
3. KPAs must be translated into primary fields in which the contract center is responsible to create exceptional strategic results.
4. KPAs will ideally be shared with other departments, so they know the areas in service that you are looking to improve – as it may impact their plans.

KPAs Don’t Have Quantifiable Targets

KPAs do not obtain a quantifiable target, because this is an area for development and not a grade which has to be reached.

This is a statement of intention and managerial orientation for the Contact Center Manager and for the intermediate management level, regarding directions to which they must take the contact center in the new year, and in which they must shine and innovate.

Different Contact Center Departments Will Have Individual and Collective KPAs

In a company which operates sales and service contact centers, each of the different managers will have different KPAs related to the fields to which he is responsible.

The customer care contact center will have KPAs in the field of innovation in service defined for them, in addition to the KPIs to which the contact center is committed.

Whereas, the sales contact center manager will have KPAs actually increasing the company’s product/service share with existing customers.

However, the two departments may then share a collective KPA of improving friendliness/courtesy while on the phone, for example.

How Does a Manager Set KPAs?

After the Contact Center Manager creates/receives the KPIs and KPAs for the upcoming year, they and – for the sake of this article – you need to create a plan for how you can better your chance of success in these KPAs.

First, you need to work out which KPIs are related to which area of development and use these measures as insight in how successful you are in improving your KPAs.

Then, define the KPAs, for those reporting to you, so the whole contact center team is wary of what they can do to reach the wider organisational goals.  

For example, if one of the KPAs defined for you is to increase advisor knowledge:

For the coach, you will define what each advisor is expected to know and give them support in ensuring that every advisor’s knowledge matches these expectations.

For the team leader, you will share methods of retaining professional knowledge among advisors and create routines to help build advisor knowledge.

For the operations manager you will discuss ways of improving knowledge management, ensuring they have the necessary resources available to do so and that advisors know how to properly navigate the current/future knowledge management system.

These are of course only some of the KPAs which will be defined for those in these roles, but it is important to make sure that roles that you assign to them are related to their job definitions.

Create a KPA Action Plan

Creating an action plan is the best way to achieve success in your KPAs. In the example above, we could help the coach, team leader and operations manager to reach their goals by:

• Working with them to define new procedures / creating new routines
• Creating a communication loop to feedback progress to the manager
• Developing new “painless” additions to common work processes

But, whatever you do when it comes to defining new KPAs, keep in mind the following three pieces of advice:

1. KPAs usually address broad aspects of the performance level and we cannot always directed into quantifiable results.
2. KPAs intensify our focus on key organisational goals. So, while a team leader will still have a main task of meeting monthly sale targets, they’ll also receive a KPA from an important but completely different field.
3. In setting KPAs – it is important to specify the wider goal, so that the team understand what they’re working towards. Connect them to the broad picture in order to make it easier for them to meet the KPAs which were defined.

While these are three key points, there is one other that you must not forget…

Do Not Define What Success Will Look Like in Terms of KPI Results

When a KPI becomes a target, we lose focus on solely improving the KPA – which is the wrong thing to do.

Why? Here are three reasons not to:

• Because we don’t always know how we want the end result to appear exactly
• Because the definition of an accurate result already makes the issue into a KPI and thus limits the possibilities of growth and development
• Because improving KPAs is not always our full focus, we only wish to motivate progress therein and, therefore, there is no room for it.

In Summary

When defining annual targets for managers, team leaders and advisors in the contact center, we want to show them why these targets are important and link them to the organisational goal.

KPAs allow us to set broader objectives for the contact center team. We should not set KPI targets, but we just want to create an action plan for how we can improve customer success in that area.

Alternatively, KPIs simply provide a helpful measure to demonstrate our progress in each KPA. Just remember, that they should not become targets.

So, from the level of the advisor to the level of the contact center manager, it is recommend that you define KPAs for success and not only KPIs.

Good luck!