Helping Contact Centre Team Leaders do better starts with understanding what gets in their way.
This article is part of our Team Leader Resource Series — a collection of practical articles to help Team Leaders grow their skills, shift their mindset, and elevate the way they lead.
The Most Important Job Role
The Team Leader role is the most challenging and most impactful job in the Contact Centre industry.
Their ability to multiply excellence across individuals and teams transforms outcomes for customers, their people, and the organization.
But Team Leaders everywhere struggle to overcome common barriers to their 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 them do better.
Common Barriers for Contact Centre Team Leaders
As with any Pareto analysis, a few key reasons account for most of the challenge:
- Senior Leadership sets or pursues the wrong metrics
- Team Leaders are 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
- 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 vary from Centre to Centre, I see these barriers most often.
- In this Part 1 article I cover barriers 1 – 3.
- In Help your Contact Centre Team Leaders Do Better — Part 2 I cover barriers 4 and 5.
Barrier#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 # of Contacts Handled at the Agent level — for Service-level based contacts.
Which is made worse by targeting both #of Contacts Handled (at the Agent level) and Quality (at the Agent level).
That puts Productivity and Quality at odds with each other and creates significant performance and management challenges for everyone.
Another error that we see often relates to Quality.
Quality metrics are defined in such a vague or unclear way that no one, including Team Leaders, can figure out what behaviors their frontline people 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.
Measurements that are binary.
And though Quality scores in these Centres tend to be higher, that’s a false achievement. It’s easier to earn higher scores in binary measurement environments.
But binary behaviors aren’t the kinds of behaviors that Customers remember, or that grow an Agent’s ability to communicate well — which is a life skill.
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 industry 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 reliably indicate capability or achievement.
There are plenty of people out there with loads of experience who may not have contributed all that much to where they work.
Experience matters — but it does not guarantee mastery of a business discipline.
Success in any business discipline – and Contact Centre Management is a business discipline – benefits from experience + deep industry knowledge.
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 take as well as courses tailored to the needs of different job roles and functions.
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, or Moscow, we saw first hand what that professional industry training meant to the individuals in those rooms.
We’re proud that DHL’s CIS certification incorporates many of the principles and practices we taught them.
Delivering Productivity, Quality & Culture
It’s important that every Team Leader understands how Centres work and the rationale behind the metrics and processes.
This is a prerequisite for contributing effectively and guiding Team Members toward meaningful performance. If you don’t know what great looks like and why, it’s impossible to help people reach it.
Barrier #2. Help Your Team Leaders Study Why They’re Busy
Contact Centre Team Leaders are almost 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?” She couldn’t answer.
So we set about helping her see what she was busy doing in a structured way. My background in finance helped me here.
Later on I turned this into a formal training exercise that I run in various Team Leader training courses.
Here’s more detail on that exercise.
Five Categories of Work in the Team Leader Job Role
Here’s a simple exercise I use with Team Leaders to make this visible.
Ask each Team Leader to list every responsibility they have, and assign each one to one of five categories:
- Developing their staff
- Supporting their staff
- Management and administrative work
- Developing themselves
- Other roles (such as leading internal initiatives)
Then:
- Estimate the weekly time spent on each activity
- Total the hours for each category
- Sense-check the total against the number of hours they actually work in a week
Once complete, have each Team Leader share their results so the group can see the overall picture and discuss what it means.
From there, the conversation becomes practical:
- Is time being spent in the right areas?
- What needs to change?
Even after running this exercise hundreds of times, the results are never the same.
It’s a real eye-opener for Team Leaders, because we can clearly see where time could be better spent.
Barrier #3. Great Agents Don’t Automatically Make Great Team Leaders
It’s an irony of the Contact Centre ecosystem that the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of a great Agent don’t readily translate into the knowledge, skills & attitudes of a great Team Leader.
An Agent’s job role can be succinctly expressed as doing the right things at the right times. Their contribution is primarily at the individual level.
The Team Leader’s job role is different.
They achieve results through the work of other people.
Their role is to understand organizational and centre objectives and enable every individual on their team to contribute to them through the work they do and the behaviors they bring to life.
While this description looks simple, there’s a lot behind it.
This is why structured development matters. There’s a lot to know — which also means there is a lot to teach others.
And that’s one sign of a business discipline — not just a job.
Establish Formal Hiring Criteria
To hire and grow the right people to be Team Leaders, you need to clearly understand the role.
So establish formal hiring criteria for the role.
One that lists out all the required competencies across knowledge, skills, and attitude categories.
You’ll ask yourself:
- Which competencies do we hire for?
- And which competencies will we equip Team Leaders with?
When you spend the time to get this right, it will guide you in hiring and developing the right people for the role.
Whether or not they were great Agents before.
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.
That’s not always the case.
When they know what they’re talking about, they’re ready to have frequent and meaningful conversations with their people.
Remember that talking nonsense or personal opinion doesn’t move the dial on performance and outcomes.
If you’d like, you can read the Part 2 of this article here:
Help Your Contact Centre Team Leaders Do Better — Part 2
Thank You for Reading
I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this resonates, I’d love to stay connected.
You can drop me a line anytime, or subscribe via our website.
Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com
