Managing a busy contact center is never easy. You have so many demands on your time and attention – analytics, goals, and measurements on top of scheduling, personnel, and training. It’s a herculean job on the best of days.

But two distinct priorities separate the good managers from the best. In fact, working on these two areas could make all the difference in your team’s success and in your career’s future. Take a few moments to consider these areas and how you can improve your performance this week.

Understand Your Employees

Bad managers ignore their associates’ needs. Good managers learn proven management strategies to help make the most of their team. But the best managers recognize the unique potential in each individual representative and work to bring it out successfully.

How well do you know each of your employees? Have you identified one or two most important motivators for each one – why they come to work each day? Do you know what each one struggles with in their role and where they want more training and support?

And what about their pride in accomplishment? What makes them feel successful in their job? What goals have they personally set and what is standing in the way? How do they explain their job to others?

The answers to these questions aren’t easy. Take time to coach each associate one-one-one until you get to know them well and understand these internal motivations. When you do, you’ll know what language and methods to use to bring out their very best service.

Understand Your Product

Bad managers don’t care about their role; it’s just a job. Good managers work to meet expectations and make sure the metrics are acceptable. But the best managers strive to become experts on the company’s products and services until they know the company inside and out.

How well do you know your company’s product or service? Do you use it regularly? If it is a business service, have you taken time to forge a relationship with a business using your service so you understand how it meets their needs – or leaves them frustrated? Are you able to anticipate customer concerns because of your intimate understanding of daily use?

Are you enthusiastic about the service your company is providing to the community? Are you able to communicate to your team and to customers the long-range vision for how your company impacts individuals and achieves a greater good? Have you internalized your brand message so much that those around you know that you believe it?

It is from that deep, intimate understanding of your company’s products and services that you will motivate your own contact center team toward greater service. They rely on you to distill that message, so dig deeper until you capture that vision. Then you can share it with others.

KOVA shares your vision for better customer interactions. Contact us today to let us help you achieve your goals.

There are few tools so valuable to a contact center manager as the Think Tank. By coordinating the top performers to team up and solve management, employee, queue, and customer problems, the manager strengthens morale while meeting his most important goals. In short, the Think Tank is the contact center’s secret weapon.

Top performers, too, are highly motivated to participate in these problem-solving and procedure-creation meetings. They appreciate the chance to make their voices heard, to demonstrate their leadership and problem-solving abilities, and to step away from the contact center floor to make a difference. As chosen leaders of their team, they strive to prove their value to the company as a whole.

So how does a contact center manager begin a Think Tank for the first time? We’ll give you the steps for success so you can meet your next challenge.

  1. Identify your top performers.

Find those team members with highest performance, attendance, and professionalism and recognize them publicly as your new Think Tank. Be sure to include reasons these individuals were chosen so the remaining team members know what qualities to aspire to in the future.

  1. Identify issues.

No doubt you have several on your desk right now – customer complaints, employee morale, queue time, quality assurance, and more. You likely have benchmarks from corporate, too, that need to be implemented. Make a list of your top concerns you want to tackle first.

  1. Gather information.

Likely each issue has some background: how did this start, who brought it to attention, what caused the issue, why the issue must be addressed. Find all the facts for each problem so it will be clear to your Think Tank.

  1. Provide the tools.

In order to solve the problem, your Think Tank needs all the relevant information, including policies in place, procedures that are affected, budgets, expenses so far, metrics, and measurements.  The more you give them to work with, the more creative they can be with solving the problem, as each tool will speak to each personality differently. Come prepared with this information, and be expecting questions for more, as well.

  1. Create milestones.

You need to benchmark the expectations. Does this problem need to be solved immediately, or do you want the Think Tank to consider possibilities and reconvene? What are the ramifications of postponing a solution or delaying action? Be clear on any deadlines.

As your Think Tank proposes solutions, be sure to benchmark milestones for their plan, as well. When will action begin? How long should be given before observing results? How will progress be measured? Guide your Think Tank toward putting these down, as well, so their progress can be quantified. This helps keep your Think Tank grounded and action-oriented. You will also encourage the Think Tank toward continued success as they measure and celebrate the progress of their proposals.

Keep your Think Tank sharp with continued use. Agile contact centers utilize Think Tanks at least once a month and more often as issues arise. In only one or two hours a meeting, your contact center can achieve valuable results.

KOVA helps you get results fast in your contact center with our unique solutions. Contact us today to add us to your team.

Although contact centers began as a means of addressing customer comments and complaints, innovations in enterprise software have made contact center marketing a reality in today’s business world. Because contact centers focus on direct communication with consumers, they are able to supply CMOs with vital information that can improve marketing efforts.

A Vital Point of Consumer Contact

Contact centers provide critical support to any brand ethos. In addition to helping customers get the most from products and services, contact center personnel are strategically placed to gather information about consumers’ purchasing habits and background information. No longer just a way to mollify unhappy consumers, contact centers are a means of keeping and expanding business opportunities. Both B2B and B2C marketing can benefit from contact center campaigns.

Getting Started: Reacting to Reactions

The facts speak for themselves: Every Fortune 500 company makes use of at least one contact center – whether in-house or outsourced to an agency.

Using customer relationship management tools, businesses can capture information that can be used in a broad swath of planning, from creating customized prompts for a website to planning a major marketing campaign.

Contact Center Marketing Muscle

But perhaps the most important benefit accruing from contact center management software is the opportunity to generate and periodically update call lists for cold-calling and general sales drives.

Marketing campaigns that are conducted by telephone are more likely to get a response. A 2012 survey issued by the Direct Marketing Association found that marketers on average experienced a 12.95% response rate for telephone campaigns – compared to direct mail (3.4%), email (.12%), post card (2.47%), and catalog (4.26%).

A Direct Response Marking Plan

Marketing departments need to plan carefully to ensure they realize maximum advantage from contact center initiatives.

The first step is anticipating customer response to a campaign. Providing contact center associates with a detailed response that aligns with brand ethos and hits the marketing notes you’re aiming at, is an important component.

Hand in hand with this is the need to provide a strategy for how contact center associates will respond to customers who fail to respond to the campaign. Should they contact them by phone? Chat? How much time should pass before contacting? (Note: it is imperative that marketing departments regularly review and update call lists to ensure acceptable response levels.)

The concrete result of this planning is the creation of scripts for contact center associates to use. Questions that are specific to demographic groups in your customer base can be entered into contact center management software to ensure maximum engagement with callers.

Realizing Maximum Potential: Contact Center Management Software

Because critical marketing information is supplied by contact centers, it is important that your conact center has the best management software to track and capture this data. Enterprise Feedback Management software (EFM) provides the tools needed to get a complete picture of how customers view your business, products, and services.

EFM can provide actionable data quickly to support sales and marketing campaigns. Benefits of EFM include:

Using customizable, interactive dashboards, branded reports, and embeddable widgets, you can share information and highlight actionable results.

Disparate systems and processes can be unified, enhancing and smoothing the decision making process.

Survey responses can be centralized and the data combined with information from other systems to create better reports and better customize surveys to align with demographics.

EFM possesses both the metrics needed to formulate KPIs and the support to benchmark progress toward them.

Create training opportunities for associates that is based upon individual performance as well as meeting sales goals.

KOVA: Innovation To Power Your Enterprise Goals

Our comprehensive array of solutions fits every contact center’s needs. From workforce management to customer satisfaction, KOVA has the tools you need to make your business leaner, more agile, and profitable. Our software solutions are scalable and can be tailored to your company’s unique business challenges.

Contact us today and learn how KOVA can improve your contact center’s performance.

 

Every day, contact center managers work to ensure high call quality. So what the associates say on the other end of the line can be a real source of stress. Will they maintain a high level of professionalism and customer satisfaction?

The most important part of supporting a contact center staff is the daily update. Those morning huddles, printed FAQs, or email reminders are integral to maintaining continuity within the calls.

Associates also benefit from a clear strategy for trouble calls. Rehearsing what to do when trigger words are spoken or calls escalate increases the likelihood of those important calls being passed up to a supervisor appropriately.

There are still more ways a manager can take action to ensure his representatives are doing well.

Schedule management appropriately.

It isn’t fun to work the night shift, holidays, or weekends. But good contact center managers know the importance of being on the floor during high volume times. When representatives are waving for information or standing to pass up a troubled call, they need to see management coming to take control.

This increases employee morale, as representatives know they can count on support when they need it. And the more management is on the floor hearing the questions and offering help, the more in-tune they will be to the needs of the contact center as a whole.

Set clear expectations.

Beginning in training and continuing through each daily huddle, representatives should be presented with the ideal call strategy and how to accomplish those goals. They need a play book with updated plays for each new scenario as it comes up.

But representatives also need – and need to be reminded of – the consequences of not following proper procedure. By staying consistent in administrating the disciplinary protocol, management gives security to the staff. They know what to expect and what is expected of them.

That means that management cannot leave call monitoring to Quality Assurance, either. To remain familiar with the level of care each call is receiving, it is imperative that managers listen in regularly, at a minimum of one or two calls per week for each representative. Managers can even set up a spreadsheet to track the week’s monitoring and results.

Representatives should welcome this regular monitoring. High performing reps will be happy to have management hear them doing good work; this is a great defense against complaints against them, as they will have a track record of proper adherence to point to. And of course, managers can catch misinformation or improper procedures before they become a greater problem.

These examples from monitoring make great ideas for daily huddles. Managers can recognize individuals for exceptional service during the past day’s work and bring any known issues to the team’s attention.

Managers will always experience stress around call quality. But with proper monitoring, personal availability, provided information, and procedural discipline, they can rest assured the representatives have what it takes to be successful.

KOVA offers superior solutions that make call monitoring easy and effective. Contact us today for information on how our Audiolog software can help your contact center.

It keeps you awake at night and nags you every day – what are your representatives really saying on the other end of the line? Could they be giving misinformation? Might they anger customers? Will they fail to pass a problem call up to a leader, instead lying to a customer that “I am the supervisor” to avoid coaching?

It takes a lot of faith in one’s staff to manage a busy contact center. But there are concrete steps a manager can – and should – take to ensure the quality of each and every call. If managers and supervisors are conscientious about these areas, call quality and customer satisfaction will steadily increase.

Keep them informed.

Representatives struggle to maintain a high level of care when they are left in the dark. The most important support each manager can make is the daily update. Each day’s huddle must include new information on the company products and services or answers to upcoming questions so employees are ready for the day’s queue.

A good manager will also hand the representatives the daily update in a written form. This will help jog the representative’s memory over the course of a long day and cut down on questions requiring unnecessary wait times.

Whether the daily update is given orally, passed out on paper, or emailed to associates, the manager should require each associate reply that the changes are understood. This is integral to maintaining accountability for the information.

Prepare them for trouble.

Set a clear expectation for trouble calls. Define clearly during training what constitutes a trouble call – red flag words the caller may use, issues that arise with the account, a level of service dissatisfaction, and abusive language are all areas that should be covered. Make it clear at what point the representative should pass the call up to a supervisor or manager and what the procedure for doing so should be.

Some contact centers have body language for levels of call trouble. For instance, if a call brings up a question or concern the representative feels unequipped to handle, the representative may raise a hand or wave a paper in the air to attract attention. If a call escalates to a trouble call, especially with abusive language or alert terminology, the representative stands and looks directly at the manager or supervisor for help quickly.

Using physical cues for trouble calls is beneficial for both representatives and for managers. Obviously, the alert manager can see at a glance who needs assistance and which questions are most urgent. But for the representative, the movement can be helpful in and of itself. By moving the body – changing position, waving arms, or walking in place – the representative engages more areas of the brain, increasing problem-solving benefits when most needed.

The contact center manager may never know exactly what is happening on each and every call. But by properly equipping the representatives daily and by giving clear expectations for trouble calls, management can be assured the reps are set up for success.

KOVA can also help to set your reps and your contact center up for success with our Impact360 Workforce Optimization Solutions. Contact us today for more information!

It’s a fact of life for every contact center – difficult calls will come. As a manager, you are the employee’s first line of defense, offering the information and support the employee needs to handle each stressful situation.

Since you know that into every call cue some difficult calls must fall, be prepared with a plan of defense to ready your team. With some foresight and preparation, you can minimize the harmful effects of these difficult interactions, both to the company and to the call center team.

Anticipate customer difficulties.

When your brand changes message, upgrades a product, or enacts a recall, you know customer service calls will go up. Keep your team informed of major changes coming soon and provide the information they need to meet customer needs in a timely manner. Provide anticipated questions they may receive and sample answer they can use. And as the calls begin coming in, stay in close communication with your team to find if any unanticipated concerns are arising so you can give the entire team support.

Continue role playing.

You likely practiced quite a bit of role playing when you brought new team members on the floor. Don’t stop once they become more experienced. Continue practicing routine and unusual questions, both on the computer and in team huddles. This keeps your team sharp and helps them continue to grow in their customer service skills.

Habitually shadow and support.

Your team members need to see you on the floor every day, listening, patting on the back, and giving help or encouragement. While you walk the floor, you will hear mistakes that may be made or even witness an escalating call and be able to step in with information or even take over a stressful situation. There is no substitute for being there.

Create emergency signals.

During stressful calls, sometimes putting a customer on hold only makes things worse. Give your team an easy way to get your attention. For instance, you could ask them to wave a hand in the air if they need information or have a non-threatening issue. Have your associates take a more obvious move like standing up in their station if they have a critical call or irate customer that needs immediate support.

Developing physical signals for help accomplishes two things. Most obvious, it draws attention across a busy contact center to an issue that needs leadership attention immediately. But it also helps the customer service professional mentally; taking a physical change of position and using body movements helps trigger new areas of the brain to work, which helps the associate think more creatively and quickly to come to a faster solution for the customer.

Be aware of the contact center mood.

Most of all, the contact center leaders need to be constantly aware of what is going on around their floor. By staying active by walking around the floor and staying vigilant to look across the associates, managers and supervisors will become sensitive and supportive of the needs of associates almost before they can ask for them. That quick response makes all the difference for a satisfied customer and loyal employee.

We at KOVA want to support YOU in your contact center goals. Contact us today.

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