What are the biggest challenges faced by call center managers today?

In Call Center industry, the roughest, toughest and hardest job is to manage all the work environment, agent work ability and run smoothly within the boundaries. Call Center Manager challenges are more than any layman can understand. In the other words, only managers understand their own conditions. The persons with heart decease never survive in this post of managing all the workflow and control over the agents. Some of the call center manager challenges belong to, agent absenteeism, agent productivity level, agent work performance, first call resolution, AHT of calls and much more. Call center manager challenges have a vast list, they faced whilst their carrier, below are, some of that challenges, managers probably faced! CHALLENGE—1 Process of recruitment and retention “We believe hiring to be the most important first step towards the organizations success”. While recruitment the agents for customers center, managers have to be judgmental and quick decision maker, as they have to be select the best one from hundreds, not for brand but for the brand ambassador—customers. “According to university of Cornell, study conducted, an average rate of employee’s attrition in call center industry is more than 33% that increase the rate of challenges of managers”. After the recruitment and probationer period when agents are ready to run the campaign and fully trained in environment, the phase for finding a better earning job start. Attrition of agents are one of the most facing challenge for managers. CHALLENGE—2 Under staffing and over staffing Call center manager challenges never be same in all working session, sometimes managers face challenge to deal with the customers on peak time, reason is under staffing of employees, on the other hand, to manage the work and control on peak days, managers hire more staff, reason of over staffing. Managers know, how to engage the representative in call center But, they face different problems in all the working experience with change of time. CHALLENGE—3 Magnification of bad experience by customers With the time changes, brand loyalty and expectations level of customer varied from high to higher. If there any chance, when customer’s expectations not meet by the company or clients faced bad experience regarding service level, they not only change their loyalty and brand but also post on Facebook, will tweet on Twitter and share the status with LinkedIn followers which reveal the good image of brand turn into bad image and services. CHALLENGE—4 Increase customers satisfaction level Online shopping apps, online service provider, products and services provided within 24 hour and others offers from all over the world, customer’s satisfaction level went increase and they expect best service from their brand or link company. If they didn’t get that, they change their priorities, needs and satisfaction level and managers lose their customers who they never get back. CHALLENGE—5 Inaccurate data report and analysis Customer information and personal data is the most precious data information in the call center business. Call centers probably use different tools and gadgets for reporting and analyzing the information of customers and agent’s productivity graphs. Call center managers take different responsibilities on their shoulder, to provide the daily reports of agents to the different departments, sales graphs, marketing situation reports, market placement reports of their brand, financial reports of call center and outbound sales reports are also depends on managers. In the toughest routine scheduled, to manage all the reports precise and accurate analyze become a massive challenge for managers. CHALLENGE—6 Doing more with less resources and flexibility Call center manager’s effort hard to achieve targets and built their own team to make the paths high and unbreakable, for this managers hire the best agents for customer representative, train them with full effort. They have less resources, double challenges to overwhelming and less flexibility in their work. What happened if they trained their agents, work hard for better result but when they left, all in vain! Call center sometimes called by the cost center, as less resources and more expenses. CONCLUSION Call Center Managers, who manage workforce of agents, find out different ways of increase the productivity level of agents. Generating the reposts, analyze the efficient performance and major task is to run all the basic necessities fluently. Call center managers challenges which define above are some of the basic challenges face in the call center, as it is hard to elaborate all the faced challenges. The best manager is one who overwhelmed the challenges, find a better way to deal with them by gaining some profit from the challenging situations. Source : https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-challenges-faced-by-call-center-managers-today