Meeting the Challenges of Call Center Management Head-on

The world of the modern call center is high-stakes, high-speed, and high-pressure. Managing all the moving parts can be a major challenge for anyone, but with access to the right tools, you can overcome those challenges.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest hurdles facing call centers today according to some experts in the field.

Building and Keeping a Winning Team

A call center is only as strong as the people on your team, and these days quality agents can be surprisingly hard to find. Once you’ve got them on board, keeping them happy and productive can be just as difficult. Juliet Carnelia from USAA has said, “I think the number one challenge is finding a way to adapt the call center environment to be appealing to the new generation of workforce. Millennials love flexibility and most call centers have very little of that.”

Keeping your team engaged and satisfied can be difficult when security and room for growth are no longer enough. Job seekers are looking for real engagement with their employers’ missions, so make that a top priority for new hires and tenured employees alike.

Social Media Gives a Broad Voice to Unhappy Customers

In our totally connected world of social media, it’s easy for one unfortunate interaction to show up in the feeds of thousands of customers. The old adage that a happy customer might tell one friend, but an unhappy one will tell all his friends is proving to be true on a broader scale than we could have ever imagined. Brian Socranksy from Oracle believes that “customers are increasingly empowered by social media to publicize any bad customer service experiences.”

How to best manage this particular challenge is still unclear, besides of course trying to avoid these unfortunate interactions to begin with. A good call center manager approaches each negative interaction as an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the customer in question. Better customer relationship management (CRM) software is empowering agents to improve the quality every interaction.

Developing and Deploying Technology

The technology that powers call centers is changing rapidly, and the types of resources that used to only be available to the largest companies are now accessible to even the most lightweight organizations.

Finding a working solution for your technological needs is only part of the problem though, because sometimes too much of a good thing can be a problem in its own right.

Ben Dale-Gough with Domestic & General hit the nail on the head when he said, “With a variety of different vendors and products, contact center agents can be working with more than ten different software systems.”

So when integrating new technology into your organization, it’s important not to overload your team with so many solutions that managing them becomes a whole new problem. This is why many call center managers are choosing to streamline operations with an all-in-one call center software solution.

For more information on how to work smarter with business intelligence solutions for the modern call center, check out our Top 10 List When Considering a Cloud-Based Contact Center Solution whitepaper.