Call Center Management
Managing a call center can be very difficult at times. Motivating employees who perform a very dull and repetitive task can be challenging but management group can either make or break a company that is similar to a call center. Using different motivation types, empowering your employees and putting your employees in a position to succeed are all good ways to maximize productivity in a call center. Before we go in to managing a call center we first need to figure out what the metrics of the call center we will be managing are. For example you could be managing a service call center or you could be managing a sales call center. The managing styles are going to be different based on this. In this paper we will focus on a service center. Empowering your employees many times can help the morale of the company. As saying goes “happy employees are good employees.” If our company can successfully empower our employees then I believe we will be more successful. However, if the employees do not know a lot about the service that they are providing it is going to be hard for management to hand over the reins. To solve this problem we will put together a training program for employees that are going to be taking the service calls. For example, when somebody calls and has a problem with the product the caller is going to be more satisfied if the first person that answers the phone can take care of the problem. In some cases the first person to answer will not be able to fix the problem and in this case they need to be able get the customer to someone who will know how. In a call center it is hard to completely empower your employees because there always needs to be people at the phones taking calls. Like we discussed in class some call centers monitor time in the bathroom, the time your break takes, and how much time they spend on the phone. This is not empowering your employees. To achieve this our company would need to hire more employees to work the phones. This would cost more money however; productivity in most cases causes an increase in your bottom line. Therefore, I believe this would pay off. This would cause for people to not feel chained to their phone, and with the incentives that we will put in place later in the paper most will not take advantage of this privilege and take excessive breaks. To keep track of our employee empowerment we can keep track of the percentage of calls that are handled without having to transfer. The higher percentage the better we are doing as a company at this aspect. It is also important that we keep our turnover ratio low. Like we said earlier if our customers feel empowered they will be happier. When employees are happy they are more likely to stay with our company. If these employees stay with our company it will dramatically increase our effectiveness over the years. This is because the longer our employees stay with us the more effective they will be at their jobs. However, empowerment is not the only thing that makes employees happy. Money and promotions also make employees happy. In a call center setting we will need to put in place incentives and promotion opportunities. Incentives can come in many different forms. They can be a travel package incentive, a bonus, increased pay, and even small things such as customer recognition. In a call center setting we will balance speed with quality to evaluate our employees and give out our incentive packages. In a service call center we want our employees to take a lot of calls with a small amount of time on the phone therefore we will take the time spent on the phone per month divided by the number of calls taken. That will give us a ratio that we can compare the employee’s performance. The employee with the best ratio will receive the customer of the month recognition and a monetary bonus for that month. Another thing that will motivate our employees is we will have customer feedback