How to Manage a Call Center Workforce

by Ian Linton
An efficient call center workforce ensures customer satisfaction.

An efficient call center workforce ensures customer satisfaction.

George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images

An efficient call center workforce makes an important contribution to customer satisfaction, revenue and profitability. Call center agents use customer service skills to handle incoming inquiries promptly and efficiently, as well as sales skills to market products and services over the phone. To ensure a call center has the skills and resources to meet its objectives and targets, companies must ensure that the right recruitment, training, monitoring and supervision facilities are in place.

Provide Comprehensive Induction

Call center managers aim to recruit agents with the right combination of sales, customer service and interpersonal skills. They may hire agents with previous call center experience, or recruit people with a sales or customer service background and provide training in call center techniques. To ensure new agents are familiar with the company and its products, markets and customer service policies, provide induction training. The initial training should also cover call center technology systems and quality procedures.

Maintain Product Knowledge

Agents must maintain up-to-date knowledge of the company’s products and services so they can present the benefits effectively and answer customers’ questions accurately. To that end, arrange informational training sessions when companies launch new products or upgrade existing ones. Provide agents with product guides, sales benefits, lists of questions that customers might ask and responses to objections customers may raise. In addition, you may want to provide standard scripts that ensure agents present products and services in a consistent way.

Set Clear Policies and Procedures

Develop a set of policies and standards that agents must follow. The policies should set out the procedures for issues such as handling calls, dealing with complaints or providing refunds. In regulated industries, such as financial services, policies set out detailed procedures on offering advice to customers or selling certain types of product or service.

Balance Resources

Schedule appropriately to ensure the call center has the right number of agents on duty at peak or quiet times. Plan staffing numbers by analyzing the average number of incoming or outbound calls at different times of day. Use industry-standard formulas to calculate the number of agents required. At peak times, the call center must have sufficient agents to minimize the time callers have to wait for a reply. During quiet times, managers may allocate agents to make outbound customer service or sales calls to maintain productivity.

Monitor Performance

Monitor the performance of individual agents and the entire workforce against a set of standards to ensure quality and efficiency. Track factors such as call waiting times, the average time taken to handle a call, the number of times a customer calls back with the same request or the number of transfers an agent makes to obtain information. You also may analyze recordings of a sample of calls to monitor quality. The information from call monitoring enables you to assess agents’ performance, identify training need and improve overall workforce performance.

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