Сall center team leader: definition of the term
The call center team leader, otherwise known as call center supervisor, is a lower management role that is responsible for leading and managing the team of call center agents. Call center team leaders are directly responsible for the performance of each one of their subordinates, as they are also responsible for a bunch of administrative and management functions in terms of operating the group of agents.
Other responsibilities of a call center supervisor include:
- Take escalated calls to ensure customer satisfaction;
- Conduct and provide direct reports to upper call center management, including annual performance reports;
- Manage agent performance and ensure achieving team goals;
- Ensure healthy relationships in the team;
- Attend meetings;
- Manage agent schedules and working conditions;
- Provide ambidextrous communication with agents.
How is that to be a call center team leader? Most common questions
Call centers are different when it comes to industry specifics, types of calls or other customer requests to be processed, issue resolution process, workforce management model, etc.
But yet, even though all call centers are different, one of the things that is the same for all of them is the position of call center team leader.
We have gathered the most relevant FAQs for call center team leader position and for people who are going to work as call center supervisors, so we hope it will help you deal with it.
How many agents are under the supervisor’s management?
In general, the group of agents that is gathered under the guidance of the call center team leader contains from 6 to 16 agents.
Latest surveys show that the average call center agent to supervisor ratio is 11.7, with from 11 to 15 agents mostly included in the groups.
The actual ratio can be influenced by the following:
- The size of a call center – smaller call centers can’t afford hiring more supervisors, but still, they also have a few agents to manage
- The type of a call center – it is more common for inbound agents to have higher ratio than for outbound agents;
- The industry – some industries require more agents, which also means more workload on supervisors.
The only thing that remains unchanged is the fact that both agents and supervisors prefer smaller groups of agents to work with. Effective call center manager has to ensure stable call center environment has to communicate with contact center staff in order to agree on team size.
What are the key responsibilities of a supervisor?
In fact, call center team leaders re perhaps the most hard-working staff members in any call center – besides agents themselves. Yes, supervisors rarely face customer complaints personally, as well as they don’t work on the most important decisions, but still they do plenty of work – more than you could ever imagine.
Just check out this list of effective call center leader skills:
- Staff development
- Agent training to improve customer issues resolution and providing positive customer experiences
- Coaching
- Performance reviews, performance evaluation and feedback providing for customer service representatives
- Performance improvement plans creating
- Customer service
- Escalated calls processing
- Knowledge providing to staff
- Supporting agents, mentoring them, providing effective communication
- Management tasks
- Inspiration and regular feedback
- Providing company news
- Facilitate meetings
- Administrative tasks
- Scheduling
- Handling documentation
- Planning agent KPIs
- Conducting reports
- Other
- Take overflow calls
- Help with R&R
- Organise engagement activities
As you can see, call center team leader is a multitask position that requires creativity, communication skills, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, customer service skills, and other soft skills and hard skills that make this position much more challenging than some other call center positions, as call center supervisors often have to handle a few tasks simultaneously.