It all depends on what are the priorities and main tasks for your call center supervisors – those who are more focused on coaching require you to evaluate their coaching efforts, while those who are aiming at management tasks require more attention to this field of their work.
Most KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that team leaders can influence include: Average Handle Time (AHT), Schedule Adherence, eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), employee satisfaction scores, and so on. Also, team leaders can have agent performance metrics growth as their KPIs, because they are responsible for agent professional development.
There are also some contact centers that don’t use any KPIs at all, even though it Have a KPI on the minimum hours they need to spend coaching each week.
Top KPIs and Contact Center Metrics for Contact Centre Team Leaders:
- Quality and Coaching
- Financial
- Voice of the Customer (e.g. NPS, CSAT, CES etc.)
- Efficiency (e.g. AHT, ATT, ACW, Average time agents spend to answer inbound calls, arrival rate, agent productivity, average speed of answer, etc.)
- Service Levels (e.g. GOS, ASA, Abandonment rate, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution, customer effort score, customer retention, etc.)
There are also other customer service metrics to track, including those that require customer feedback collection through customer surveys. Thus includes customer satisfaction score, other customer experience metrics, and so on.
Skills Gaps & Job Satisfaction
There is often a situation where really important fields of team leaders’ work are misaligned with those tasks that are just considered important. Below there are survey results among call center team leaders regarding the fields of their work that they consider the most important and where they feel a need to improve their performance:
- Reporting and analysis (29%)
- Remote workforce management (28%)
- Becoming a subject matter expert (26%)
- Quality Assessment (15%)
- Coordinating rosters (14%)
Most call center team leaders consider their job very fulfilling and fulfilling:
Do Call Centre Team Leaders have to take incoming calls?
There is a recent study that shows how current call center team leaders have answered the question “Should team leaders take customer calls?”. Handling customer issues isn’t a direct responsibility of supervisors, but a satisfied customer is always better than lost customer. Let’s look at how opinions spread, anyhow.
- Yes (18%)
- No (15%)
- Only once or twice a quarter (16%)
- Only once or twice a year (7%)
- Only escalations (45%)
Training and Development for Team Leaders
As most call center team leaders are former call center agents, they don’t require training on customer service processes, but they do require it for management and team leading purposes where they often have no relevant experience. It is even more important when we take into account that huge list of responsibilities that are required from team leaders to take on.
One of the recent studies has shown that more than 50% of call centers have neither onboarding nor ongoing training programs for team leaders, so they have to gain new skills, seek knowledge and train themselves on their own which has nothing to do with efficiency.
Career Opportunities
There are plenty of career opportunities available for call center team leaders, including further career development within the call center, work outside of the call center – either in the same company or in another, or working as a team leader. In most cases ,the most preferable option for call center team leaders is to become a call center manager. The work as a call center supervisor offers relevant experience of managing key processes in a call center and working with data, which is also important for being a call center manager.
How do team leaders work in BPO?
Outsourced call centers are preferable as starting points for those call center supervisors who don’t have enough experience or qualifications to work in a business call center. There are also more working opportunities, as outsourced call centers just employ more agents, which means they need more supervisors – but there are also negative aspects of such work: salary is often lower, and the workload can be much higher.
How to improve the effectiveness of team leaders?
Having highly performing supervisors is vital for your business effectiveness, as they manage the work of agents on an everyday basis, and without their guidance and control, agents will be unable to reach expected KPIs and performance rates. Thus, you have to know how to help your supervisors reach their highest performance and do their duties as you expect them to do.
First of all, you have to provide your supervisors with onboarding and ongoing training, preferably with the participation of relevant speakers and mentors who have relevant experience of working with such projects. Secondly, you have to motivate supervisors by providing them with a reward system and accessible career growth opportunities. Finally, you have to stay in close contact with them to review analytics and other data to make improvements and find imperfections.