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In this article I share some ideas on how to help your Contact Centre Team Leaders do better.
Common barriers to Team Leader success
The Contact Centre Team Leader has arguably the most important job in a Contact Centre. Their actions or inactions directly impact productivity, quality & culture.
But the cards tend to be stacked against their success.
Why?
As with any Pareto scenario, I think a few reasons account for most of the challenge:
- Senior Leadership sets or pursues the wrong KPIs
- Team Leaders are always busy but don’t know how to allocate their time to achieve results
- What made someone a great Agent doesn’t readily translate to making them a great Team Leader
- The job role requires endless conversations – but they don’t happen often enough or well enough
- There’s a fundamental lack of structured know-how for the Team Leader to draw on to make decisions
The mix and relative impact of these barriers varies from Centre to Centre.
So let’s look at each barrier along with some related suggestions.
1. Senior leadership sets or pursues the wrong KPIs
I see this challenge all over the world. A lack of essential Operations know-how.
Chasing incorrect KPIs or KPIs that actually compete with each other.
The only way to close this gap is to ensure that the senior leadership in charge of the Centre has expressly mastered Contact Centre operations. That most often happens through participation in formal external workshops or certification programs.
Don’t count on experience alone. I hear that all the time as in “She’s an experienced Contact Centre Manager.”
Experience matters. But success requires experience + know-how.
One Client I worked with globally established an in-house ‘certification program’ after adopting the various principles and practices learned via external training. Their in-house certification ensures that what they learned about operations gets codified into their business practices across dozens of Centres.
Delivering on Productivity, Quality & Culture is the big part of the Team Leader job.
So it’s important that Centre leadership be clued in to how Centres ‘work’ and how to define and set appropriate Productivity and Quality measures for Frontliners & Team Leaders.
That’s not always the case.
How to help your Contact Centre Agents improve their Performance
2. Team Leaders are always busy – but busy doing what?
I remember in my VP Operations days I had a Team Leader come into my office.
“Dan, I’m so busy…” so I asked “OK, busy doing what?”
We then set about finding out the answer to this question – busy doing what?
To this day one of my favorite exercises in a room of Team Leaders is to conduct a time & motion study – across a typical week – of where their time goes.
The 5 Categories of the Team Leader job role
When I conduct a formal Team Leader time & motion study, I use 5 different categories to categorize and then analyze where their time goes.
- Developing their staff
- Supporting their staff
- Doing administrative & management work
- Developing themselves
- Other roles such as taking on the role of committee head
I ask each Team Leader to consider everything they do, estimate a weekly time spent on each activity and then slot each activity into one of the 5 categories.
Then we sum up the time for each category and share the results on a whiteboard for everyone to see.
When you talk to Team Leaders (and their Managers) they all say that they spend a lot of time developing their staff – coaching, performance appraisals, developmental conversations.
But when the numbers are laid out – Team Leader by Team Leader in black and white – that’s not usually how it plays out.
What the results tell us
I’ve had time & motion sessions where we learned that nearly 50% of Team Leader time spent was spent on administrative & management work. Is all this admin work really valuable? Could some it be redesigned, reassigned or even eliminated? I worry about turning Team Leaders into admins.
When it comes to personal development I tend to see 0% of Team Leader time spent in a typical week. You can shout lifelong learning from the rooftops all day – but check out how many hours in a typical week your Team Leaders really learn something. It’s an eye opener.
Another common opportunity that pops up is to help Team Leaders figure out if they’re offering too much Staff support.
My definition of Staff support is helping the Frontliners to do their job.
Handling too many escalations or fielding the same questions over and over means the Team Leader is doing the Agent job for them. And that takes away the Team Leader’s time for Staff development.
Sure – Staff support will always be intrinsic to the job.
But time invested in Staff support – over and above a tolerable minimum – isn’t going to move the Team forward.
Another interesting trend has popped out during these time & motion sessions.
Sometimes, when Staff development hours look low, we uncover that Team Leaders avoid having developmental conversations with their staff.
Not because they don’t see them as important. But because they lack the self-confidence to coach or have those important people management discussions.
That can be addressed.
3. Great performance as an Agent doesn’t readily translate into great performance as a Team Leader
It’s an irony of the Contact Centre ecosystem that the knowledge, skills & attitudes of a great Agent don’t readily translate into the knowledge, skills & attitudes required of a great Team Leader.
If you consider that the job of a former great Agent is to replicate their personal success across other people you can see what they need to know and be able to do is quite different than before. Their job role becomes about ‘them’ – not about ‘me’ anymore.
There’s also a bit of psychology at play here as well.
We all like to do what we’re good at.
So sometimes the new Team Leader spends an inordinate amount of time handling escalations and engaging in Staff support – because that’s where their formery mastery lay.
Defusing angry Customers and using their product, systems and organizational know-how.
But as we covered earlier, Staff support – though an intrinsic part of the job role – doesn’t move the performance dial forward.
So evaluate your Team Leader hiring criteria on what it takes to be a great Team Leader. Not on the fact that this candidate was a great Agent.
When I’m hiring for Team Leaders I always ask myself these questions:
1. What are the specific competencies across knowledge, skills & attitudes I need from a new Team Leader hire? And what are the minimum existing levels of each competency to be considered for hiring? I have to be realistic here because – at hiring – nearly no one will come with all the competencies expected nor at the levels expected for a professional Team Leader.
2. What is my defined developmental roadmap to raise my Team Leader competency levels – across the identified competencies – to expectation within the next 6 months or year?
I think a lot of Contact Centres struggle with this.
There seems to be an assumption that the Team Leader can just somehow pick this all up on the job.
Or perhaps it’s inertia – doing nothing is just easier than doing something. Hope as a strategy. I’ve been guilty of that one.
One common scenario involves corporate learning & development departments.
Contact Centres are unique and specialized environments. Trying to graft generic service or people management or leadership training onto the Contact Centre delivers mixed results at best. Because it’s not specific enough to the environment in which these Team Leaders operate.
More on competencies soon.
4. Team Leaders need to have lots of great conversations
If the Agent job role is to have great conversations with Customers, then the Team Leader job role is about having great conversations with the folks that they lead.
What kinds of conversations? Wow – there are a lot – but they can be learned.
I like to cover them in people management & coaching courses.
Here is a list conversations that are specific to the Contact Centre environment and which are most often conducted by Team Leaders:
- Praise
- Gratitude
- Something ‘good’
- Something ‘not so good’
- It’s not getting any better
- Transaction coaching
- Performance appraisal
- Team reviews
- One on one reviews
- Boss as Leader
- Boss as Person
- Boss as Manager
- Things you don’t talk about (the un-conversation)
Each of these conversations is triggered by an event or is pre-planned into a calendar. For example Team & One on one reviews and many coaching sessions tend to be pre-scheduled while Praise or Something Good conversations happen when the Team Leader either observes something or learns about something.
As you might have figured out – most of these conversations fall into the Staff development category we covered earlier in this article.
But when Team Leaders are ‘too busy’ – the first category that gets ‘cut’ is Staff development. Exactly the category which typically needs more time spent – not less.
5. Team Leader know-how
The Contact Centre environment is complex.
I think that’s why folks like me – who fall into it by accident – end up making the Contact Centre and Customer Experience, a life’s passion. There’s only ever more to learn and it’s super interesting stuff.
It’s not easy. But Tom Hanks says that it’s ‘the hard that makes it great’.
If you want to equip your Team Leaders to succeed you need to consider equipping them with know-how across these domains:
- Contact Centre Operations – there’s simply no excuse not to equip Team Leaders with operations mastery
- Monitoring & Coaching – this process is key to driving Quality, FCR, Employee Engagement, Customer Satisfaction and CX strategies
- Leadership & Engagement – what does leadership look like as a Team Leader? How can a Team Leader use proven engagement models in their Centre?
- People Management – for me this is about having those great conversations with the people who work for you at the right times and in the right way
- Customer Experience – if your Centre promotes itself as fulfilling the ‘Customer Experience’ your folks deserve training on what it is (and it’s not Customer Service)
- Self-Management – stress management, personal fulfillment, working through change – these are life skills
When your Team Leader is able to bring out the best Productivity, Quality & Qttitudes of the folks that work for them that translates into better results all the way around for you.
Thank you for reading!
Daniel
The challenge for Team Leaders is that they either don’t know about the many different kinds of conversations at their disposal or they haven’t grown confident in the use of the conversations.
Senior management wants the essence of the organization to cascade throughout every department and level.
When we teach the Vision, we help people understand that this is a point in time in the future (as in our organization aims to become…).
