8 Productivity Hacks for Call Center Supervisors

1. Use call center dialers for outbound calls and automated callbacks.

How much time do you spend catching up on missed calls? Or sending out announcements, reminders, and updates?

Dialing a series of numbers, waiting for connections, listening to busy tones, and leaving voicemails can eat up a lot of time.

Instead of working your way through your call list yourself, go with a call center dialer that automates your outbound calls and callbacks.

You can even automate follow-up calls to emails. That is if your call center dialer is integrated with your customer relationship program.

If it is, the call system can automatically pull out the customer’s information and display their name, account, and any relevant information.

2. Get an automatic call distributor.

It isn’t difficult to set up an automatic call distributor (ACD). You can easily arrange to have certain customers directed to a particular agent or agent group.

Even complicated routing requirements can be handled with a sophisticated ACD. And an IVR-based distributor that integrates with your CRM is even more versatile.

Let’s say you want to direct a customer to a specific agent, but there’s a chance the agent will be busy or not even working. You can create a primary routing rule for your preferences, with a fallback rule to cover your bases.

You can make several automated routing arrangements based on different agent skills, customer preferences, and other options.

So, rest assured, you don’t need a human agent to manually handle your call distribution. You can speed this up and get your call center far more productive with an advanced ACD.

3. Use call monitoring tools.

Call monitoring is the best way to assure quality. Managers at least need the ability to drop in on calls at any time.

You can provide targeted quality assurance by listening in on calls and giving agents helpful messages. But how do you know which calls to listen to?

Random drop-ins or constant personal oversight isn’t a realistic or efficient approach for any call center. This is why advanced call monitoring tools have skyrocketed productivity.

Smart call center systems can listen in for you, paying attention to things like customer sentiment, agent script adherence, and customer interest levels.

And you’ll get insight on things like agent performance, campaign statistics, and call queues.

4. Record every customer call.

Call recordings go hand in hand with monitoring. You might want to revisit calls where the quality dipped or agents performed outstandingly. Or maybe check on a customer complaint.

You can get this done with a system that records every call and attaches it to the customer ticket.

Building a comprehensive recording database will help you precisely identify training needs. And this in turn improves agent performance and overall productivity.

By the way, transcripts can be automatically generated. Having transcripts on hand saves a lot of time when you want a quick call overview. You can also extract from transcripts for training purposes or to do further performance analysis.

5. Record your agents’ screens.

What’s better than call listening and performance analysis? Getting a full-screen view of everything your agents are looking at.

You can now view your agents’ screens in real-time. Anytime they are supposed to be working, you’ll have a full view.

So, if you’ve been curious as to how your agents spend their time when working at home or simply out of view, you can see everything for yourself.

And they won’t need to implement new hardware or install anything.

This isn’t just about agents. You can use this to analyze how well your systems and work routines are working.

It will help you develop training programs around your agents’ real behavior.

6. Bring in workforce management tools.

You don’t need to micromanage your agents to run a smooth operation. In fact, the more complicated your scheduling is, the better it will be when using a capable solution.

It might be time to adopt some workforce management solutions. This will optimize your agents’ workloads to provide the best customer service possible.

It does this by balancing agent skills and availability against your call volume and service level goals. And you end up with the ideal workforce schedule.

Some options include  Calabrio, Verint’s Monet, and Envision. Whichever you choose, make sure it can properly integrate with your call center.

7. Use communication tools such as Slack.

Slack revolutionized workforce communication. It’s perfect for teams and groups who need to stay in touch throughout the day.

It doesn’t get much better than Slack. They basically invented and mastered this type of communication. And your call center can get all the productivity benefits Slack has to offer with a deep CTI integration that instantly delivers reports, alerts, and notifications.

Slack is known for its channel organization. Bringing this into your call center will make it easier to track critical reports, escalations, and performance flags.

Using Slack lets agents, account managers, and supervisors keep each other looped in no matter how busy things get.

8. Use time management and productivity tools.

A dedicated time management tool will help everyone become more efficient. An app like Time Doctor is great for call centers to use since it offers features for supervisors and team members.

You can track how long agents take to perform tasks or projects, generate insights, and learn how to increase productivity.

This will identify where individual agents are falling short and what’s holding your center back.

Productivity tools can work for small department contact centers and large enterprise operations. And since many integrate with other apps, it will fit perfectly into your entire technology stack.