Help your Contact Centre Team Leaders do better.
The Team Leader role is the most challenging—and arguably the most impactful—job in the Contact Centre industry.
Their ability to multiply excellence across their teams can transform outcomes for Customers, Employees, and the Organization.
Yet, despite its importance, many Team Leaders struggle to overcome common barriers to success.
In this Part 1 of a 2-part article, I share the five most common barriers we see in our global work with Team Leaders.
Along with observations and ideas to help Team Leaders do better.
You read the Introduction to our Team Leader Series of articles here.
Common barriers to Contact Centre Team Leader success
The Contact Centre Team Leader has arguably the most important job in a Contact Centre.
Team Leaders shape productivity, quality, and culture across their Frontline Teams. Yet, their success is often undermined by systemic barriers.
Which barriers?
As with any Pareto analysis I think a few key reasons account for most of the challenge:
- Senior Leadership sets or pursues the wrong metrics
- Team Leaders are always busy but not sure how to rethink where their time goes
- Being a great Agent doesn’t mean they’ll be a great Team Leader
- Many important conversations between Team Leaders and their people don’t happen often enough or well enough
- Team Leaders lack critical industry know-how to power their decision making and develop their people
Though the mix and relative impact of these barriers varies from Centre to Centre I see these barriers most often.
In this Part 1 article I will cover barriers 1 – 3 along with relevant observations and suggestions.
In Help your Contact Centre Team Leaders do better – Part 2 I’ll wrap up by covering barriers 4 and 5.
1. Help your Contact Centre Team Leaders by setting the right metrics
In some Centres, Senior Leadership sets the wrong metrics.
For example, a classic mistake is targeting both # of Contacts Handled (for Service-level based contacts) and Quality at the Agent level.
A decision that puts Productivity and Quality at odds with each other. And creates all kinds of performance and management challenges.
https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/contact-centre-kpis-the-green-jaguar/
Or Quality metrics that are so vaguely defined that no one can figure out what behaviors Frontline Agents are supposed to bring to life.
And in some Centres, Quality metrics are still designed primarily around compliance behaviors.
Do this or that. Say this or that.
And though the Quality scores in these Centres tend to be higher, that’s a false achievement.
Because a culture of compliance behaviors never raises the bar on earning a Customer connection.
Or grows the skills and abilities of a Frontline Agent.
Senior Leadership needs to know their operations
In other industries where the work is considered to be a business discipline, there are recognized ‘badges’ of mastery.
- Accountants may be CPAs or Chartered Accountants
- Doctors will have degrees and industry credentials
- Attorneys will have passed their bar exam
In contrast, the credential you most often hear in the Contact Centre industy is “years of experience”.
She’s an experienced Contact Centre Manager.” or“He’s been working in the industry for X number of years.”
But years of experience don’t tell you much about an individual’s capabilities and achievements.
There are plenty of people out there with loads of “years of experience” who may not have contributed all that much to where they work.
Experience matters.
But be careful not to assume a causal relationship between years of experience and the mastery of a business discipline.
Success in any business discipline – and Contact Centre Management is a business discipline – benefits from experience + deep industry knowledge and expertise.
DHL Express’ Certified International Specialist program
DHL Express, one of our global Clients, established an in-house ‘Certified International Specialist’ (CIS) learning & development journey for all of their Employees.
The DHL CIS program includes courses that all Employees must take as well as courses tailored to the needs of different job roles and functions.
We’re proud that the DHL CIS internal certification for their Contact Centre and Customer Service people incorporates many of the principles and practices that we taught them.
DHL Express engaged us to train their entire Contact Centre and Customer Leadership Team around the world over a number of years.
And whether we were in Brussels, Tampa, Moscow, Beijing or Singapore, we saw first hand what that professional industry training meant to the individuals in those rooms.
How grateful and happy they were to have the opportunity to decipher and understand the environment they were responsible for taking care of.
Delivering Productivity, Quality & Culture is at the core of the Team Leader job role.
It’s important that every Team Leader knows how Centres work and the why behind how the various metrics and processes are established.
That’s a pre-requisite for them to contribute appropriately and guide their Team Members to levels of performance that matter.
I always think of those saftey videos that you see on planes when I think of formal learning and know-how.
“Put the mask on yourself first” – I translate that part of the safety video as ‘Make sure the Leaders of the Centre at all levels have know-how mastery”.
“Then put the mask on others” – I translate that phrase as “Ok Leaders – now that you know go and help those around you grow their own know-how mastery”.
If you’d like to learn more about the Agent job role you can read our What to know about Contact Centre Agent Performance article here.
2. Help your Team Leaders study why they’re busy
Contact Centre Team Leaders are always busy.
I remember in my VP Operations days I had a Team Leader come into my office and say – “Dan, I’m so busy…”
So I asked “OK, busy doing what?” And she couldn’t answer the question.
So we set about helping her see what she was busy doing in a structured way. My former work as a Finance executive helped me here.
And later on I turned this into a formal training exercises that I run in our Team Leader training courses.
Here’s more detail on that exercise.
Five categories of work in the Team Leader job role
When I run a formal Team Leader time & motion study, I ask the Team Leaders to look at every responsibility they have and assign it to one of five categories of work.
The categories –
- Developing their staff
- Supporting their staff
- Doing management & administrative work
- Developing themselves
- Taking on Other roles (such as head of the recreation club)
After they’ve listed everything, I ask them to estimate the weekly amount of time spent on each activity.
Once that’s done I ask them to sum up their weekly totals for each category.
And double check that the total hours they come up with is a fair representation of the number of hours they actually work in a week.
Then, when everything has been double-checked, each individual Team Leader puts up their results on the whiteboard.
So that we can all see all the results and talk about what they mean.
And talk about what we could do to change the results if we think that our current results aren’t taking us and our Team in the right direction.
Even after running this exercise hundreds of times, the results never comes out exactly the same.
And it remains one of my single most favorite exercises.
https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/when-you-coach-youre-either-helping-or-youre-keeping-score/
3. Being a great Agent doesn’t mean they’ll be a great 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.
An Agent’s job role can be succinctly expressed as doing the right things at the right times.
While they are member of a Team, much of their work is done at the individual level.
They’re probably busy having conversations with the Organization’s Customers, Guests and Patients.
The Team Leader’s job role is different.
The Team Leader’s job role can be succcintly expressed as understanding Organizational and Centre objectives to enable and support the performance of every individual in their Team to contribute to those objectives.
And of course, over time, continue to grow and develop every individual.
https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/how-team-leaders-can-talk-like-a-leader/
Help your Contact Centre Team Leaders by establishing formal hiring criteria
You need to understand the job role well.
To hire the right people for that role as well as recognize and plan for their need to deveop in that role.
So establish a formal hiring criteria for the role.
One that lists out all the required competencies across all the required (or desired) knowledge, skills and attitude categories.
Put another way you’re asking yourself –
- What specifically does a Team Leader need to know to flourish here?
- What skills does a Team Leader need to develop to flourish here?
- What attitude(s) does a Team Leader need to choose to flourish here?
These aren’t simple 5-minute questions.
When you spend the time to get this right, it will guide you to hire, train and develop the right people for the role.
Whether or not they were great Agents before.
(And this is a likely topic for a separate and future article).
Team Leaders need to pour from a full cup
Team Leaders need to pour from a full cup
When I say that Team Leaders need to pour from a full cup, I mean that they have to know what they’re talking about and then go out there and talk about it – a lot.
They need to have frequent and meaningful conversations with their people.
Some of those conversations will be in group settings and some of those will be in one on one settings.
Remember that talking nonsense doesn’t move the dial on performance and outcomes.
To have a full cup Team Leaders need to know what they’re talking about.
Not make it up as they go along. Or fill their conversations with their own personal opinions.
Just remember how I succinctly describe the Team Leader job role –
The Team Leader’s job role can be succcintly expressed as understanding Organizational and Centre objectives to enable and support the performance of every individual in their Team to contribute to those objectives.
And of course, over time, continue to grow and develop every individual.
Thank you for reading!
Which of these barriers resonates most with your Centre? Start by addressing just one, and watch the impact it has on your Team Leaders and their Teams!
Want to explore more stories and strategies?
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Daniel Ord
[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com
