Managing a busy call center can be an incredibly challenging job, and it often might seem like, with all of the non-stop changes and innovations coming to the industry, it’s impossible to find the right guide for a manager who needs some tips or just a little help.

But as it turns out, there’s a healthy market of call center-related books for a manager or supervisor to choose from, and even the ones that might have been published before the recent trend towards automation might have something to offer.

Here’s a list of books that every call center manager can benefit from.

The Call Center Handbook: The Complete Guide to Starting, Running and Improving Your Call Center (5th Edition), by Keith Dawson.

Dawson’s seminal book was published back in 1996, but if you’re a new call center manager or an experienced member of the industry, it’s indispensable. It takes a basic but helpful approach, talking about important strategies for creating a successful call center, keep the everyday operations of the call center as efficient as it can be and focusing on key chances to improve performance in various areas.

In other words, it might be older than most of the other books on this list, but it might also be the best one for any call center manager  to read.

Managing and Motivating Contact Center Employees: Tools and Techniques for Inspiring Outstanding Performance from Your Frontline Staff, by by Kurt Friedmann, Malcolm Carlaw, Peggy Carlaw, and Vasudha Deming

As a manager, you know better than anyone that a satisfied employee is a productive one. And yet, employee satisfaction is an oft-overlooked factor when it comes to creating a successful call center. This book was created to help you remedy that; the authors have made a helpful guide aimed at keeping your workers happy and making them as productive as a possible.

Call Center Recruiting and New-Hire Training: The Best of Call Center Management Review (2nd Edition), by Brad Cleveland and Susan Hash

As we alluded to with the previous entry, your employees are the most important ingredient for success. And that success begins in the training process. Any good manager should know how to recruit and prepare the best workforce possible, which leads to less turnover and more production goals being met.

Call Center Recruiting And New-Hire Training brings these different processes into focus, helping you to establish a plan to bring in the best people, prepare them as completely as possible and reward them for their successes.

Building Call Center Culture: Strategies for Designing a World Class Performance-Based Environment Within Your Customer Contact Center, by Dan Coen

Perhaps one of the best ways to ensure a successful and efficient call center is to create a culture within the company that promotes both. This book discusses how best to speak to employees and relate to them in a way that reinforces a culture of success.

It covered everything from real-life examples to developing the best performance skills, with a focus on ethics that some guides often ignore.

Project Management Metrics, KPIs, and Dashboards: A Guide to Measuring and Monitoring Project Performance, by Harold Kerzner

One of the more recently-published books on this list, this book makes the case that keeping an eye on the numbers is the best way to ensure a successful call center. Kerzner’s book looks at everything from from Net Promoter Scores  to Service Level targets, and argues that metrics and KPIs are probably among the best tools at your disposal when it comes to improving performance.

But rather than simply stating its case, the book also gives you advice on how to look at the numbers, giving you a deeper understanding of what they mean. Statistics aren’t as exciting as strategies to make employees happier, but in an increasingly results-driven marketplace, they could be the most important thing to focus on.