Call Center Manager Duties And Responsibilities

The call center industry is somewhat in shambles. Most businesses in this field need to deal with high turnover rates and unreliable employees. Even if they do manage to lock down a stable workforce, call centers grapple with low productivity, which often stems from dissatisfaction with the management. 

This is why you should switch up your approach right after learning about call center manager duties and responsibilities. Only satisfied employees can create happy customers so as someone in a leadership role, you need to be aware of what makes them tick the right way. 

According to currently available data, engaged employees will work harder to improve customer experience, and as a result, you can expect your sales to rise by 20%. 

But how can you implement this in a call center? 

What are the most important call center manager duties and responsibilities?

The brunt of the work involved will fall on the manager. These individuals monitor and oversee agents in the call center and are responsible for ensuring everyone is performing optimally. 

Here are the main call center manager duties and responsibilities that apply to most companies:

• Hiring and training new agents
• Translating company goals to the agents so they align with the overall vision
• Creating a clearly defined list of all routine tasks
• Assisting agents
• Continuous coaching
• Allocating resources to produce better results
• Analyzing and processing reports for submission to the management
• Collecting data at regular intervals and analyzing it to boost performance
• Supervising agents’ performance and providing feedback
• Mediating any conflicts between employees and customers
• Making sure everyone is following the company-implemented processes
• Creating presentations and other content to motivate call center agents
• Conducting customer surveys to measure customer satisfaction
• Designing customer and employee reward programs

These are the basic administrative call center management duties and responsibilities. However, what separates a seasoned manager from a beginner is focused leadership and driving employee engagement. To see to it that the team is engaged at all times, managers need to flex their social and professional skills.

For instance, while it’s not a part of the job description, a manager has to create a healthy competitive atmosphere conducive to motivating the agent to exceed expectations. There are plenty of ways to achieve this but it can be easily accomplished by rewarding agents when they perform well. If done fairly, other employees will take note and may start working harder to gain some recognition.

Similarly, managers need to stay vigilant for agents who are struggling. Most call center employees leave because they are stressed out by the job. Fortunately, an experienced manager will watch out for signs of burnout, define problem areas, and even organize coaching sessions to improve the skills and boost the confidence of agents who are having difficulties. 

In addition, managers can take care of their team by allowing more flexibility in the work schedule. This can drastically boost productivity and more importantly, work-life balance. 

Moreover, call center managers serve as the bridge between employees and upper management. Basically, they’re well-positioned to negotiate on behalf of the employees, allowing them to resolve the issue before the agent’s engagement drops.

How to start improving the efficiency of your agents

When we covered the main call center manager duties and responsibilities, we briefly mentioned how managers must assess the weaknesses, engagement levels, and strengths of each agent. While this is necessary for weekly and monthly reports, it also helps managers gain insight into how they can improve the workflows in the call center.

In a perfect world, you could simply hire agents around your company's needs, but in real life (especially considering the staffing issues in the industry), most successful companies fine-tune workflows to accommodate agents and their limitations and strong points. 

This can include organizing the team by assigning them to different types of customer interaction based on their knowledge of the matter and their strengths. 

Doing so will probably be a work in progress as the effectiveness of a new workflow may not be readily apparent. Agents can then implement new processes and optimize them based on employee or customer feedback. 

Furthermore, when it comes to boosting productivity (necessary for new workflows to function properly), managers can set time-based goals that are purpose-designed to make the entire process more engaging and fruitful. 

How to set goals?

Simple - assign metrics for the entire team. That way, you can provide information on their performance, allowing them to see how they stack up against the same metrics. Then, once you measure the performance of each employee, you can set individual goals to keep them performing at a high level.

Manager’s role in implementing omnichannel customer service

Omnichannel customer service is a standard these days, and many call centers implement it to boost their performance and support customers more effectively. 

During the infancy of omnichannel support implementation, it’s necessary to keep data on all customer interactions and make it available across various support channels. Consequently, customers don’t need to repeat information when they interact with the agents. 

One of the biggest challenges here is providing the same level of support on each channel, particularly more impersonal ones such as live chat or email. At the end of the day, this falls under call center manager duties and responsibilities. Managers need to train agents to take on a compassionate approach regardless of the communication channel.

This may require continuous coaching and organizing training sessions aimed at familiarizing agents with new technologies, allowing them to overcome any challenges they encounter en route to offering an exemplary customer service experience. 

Manage your way to success

Call center managers are at the helm of all operations in a call center. Not only do they hold the responsibility for managing agents, but they also serve a key role in improving the customer experience by keeping track of agent performance and looking for areas of improvement.

Yet, managers are also the connective tissue between the agents and upper management, and it's their role to ensure that all of the employees are happy. Considering the turnover rates are at an all-time high, choosing your managers wisely is one of the best ways to address this challenge with ease.