Call Center Metrics

The key to have a flexible workforce and a successful business venture is training support employees regularly, as much as you train your front-end workers.

A good business never misses out the training of its employees, especially training support employees. Support employees make up the back end of your company. They handle directly co-employee matters and sometimes even the recruitment of new people to work for the company. In most cases, support employees make up the first few employees hired for the company.

Training is very essential to every company’s success. A company frugally spending on training is bound to meet serious problems later on in its lifetime. The problems can mainly spring out from the inability of its employees to catch up to the ever-changing nature of business in all aspects. For example, in exporting, if a company is not flexible enough to handle client specifications about certain export product modifications, they will end up losing this client. If the client’s request were in fact new things your company has not done before as an exporting company, your lack in flexibility to meet this client’s demand can be greatly blamed on the training you have not financed for your workers.

Another problem can be your company’s worth in terms of performance. If you fall back in the competition for not training your employees, might as well say goodbye in advance to your clients and customers this early. In business, whoever presents the best package always gets the sale. How would you expect prospective clients and customers to get your services if your competitors are capable of doing things your company cannot? If they have certain services your company lacks?

On the other hand, if we talk about training back end, or support employees, it is another story. This time you are dealing with a set of employees whose task revolves more on the management of your workers as a whole and not directly about your customers and clients. This is a delicate group of people to deal with considering they have direct control on how your entire workforce will behave as a whole and how they can be productive overall. However, in most cases, people who fill your back end positions in the company are responsible people and can really carry their tasks out. This should be a relief, especially if you really trust your people in this department.

Even if your support team is a reliable bunch, it does not make them automatically skilled and competent to deal with the constant change businesses go through each day. Training every now and then is as important to these people as it is important to your workers in the front end.

A recommended mindset is to maintain balance in your workforce always. If you have been constantly training your people in the front end of your business to maintain competitiveness in the market, you should do the same to your support employees. Training support employees together with the rest of the employees can be done alternately if training resource is rather scarce, besides, you are not obliged to train them altogether anyway; just training them regularly is enough to keep business in good condition.

Managing employees of call center companies can be done successfully in many ways. Paying attention to little details and taking notes about the company will surely help.

A call center is a work environment wherein you will most likely see a lot of different personalities staying at the same place and working together toward the same goal. Lately, the trend of the business process outsourcing companies has been going offshore, more specifically towards countries like the Philippines, India, China, and others. This change does not really adjust or bridge the gap between the time differences of the eastern countries with the western ones. Philippines will always be twelve to sixteen hours ahead of the United States. This makes managing employees of call center companies such a Herculean task.

If the difference in time is that big, this means that call center employees who attend to their American customers will need to be available 24/7, or at least during daytime, American time. In short, call center employees off-shored will have to be awake at night to be able to serve their customers located at the other side of the world. If the stress level is high enough during regular working hours, imagine the stress level present when working a busy graveyard shift. It is unimaginable for those who have not been to the situation yet, but for the others who have worked in a call center, they completely understand how it feels.

The management who is aware of this situation should be able to act right away. They should look after their workers and come up with good solutions to lessen, if not completely deflate, the stress level that balloons each night’s shift. If this is left unattended, it will initiate mass resignations from employees not being able to survive their working conditions.

Letting your employees have fun and enjoy while they are at work can do wonders. It can lower attrition rate significantly. Organize fun schemes like incentives for those who are able to hit company targets. Give freebies, gift certificates, or the like. This helps shift your employees’ mindset from the stressful job they are doing to the fun things you are doing to your office.

Other than making your office a fun workplace, organizing company outings also help remove stress. Announce certain schedules of company outings and post them in strategic areas where it can be easily seen and read. Disseminate this information through email to make sure everybody is aware about your company-organized activities. Specify that the outings will happen if you accomplish certain company-wide goals and commitments with your clients. This allows you to hit two birds with one stone—the first stone being the employees staying in your call center, and the other stone, being able to fulfill your contract with your clients.

No matter how comprehensive your plans are to make your company a fun place to work with, there is no guarantee that you will completely eradicate the possibility of employees leaving your company. Managing employees of call center companies is no easy task; instead of sulking because of the not-so-successful plans you implemented, be happy and content that you were, at least, able to lessen your company’s attrition rate. Get yourself together and think of new schemes to better your plans in retaining employees.