Workforce Management Featured Article
TCN Releases Online Guide for Managing Call Center Agents
Managing call center agents isn’t the same job it was 20 years ago. Today, agents are more likely to be geographically dispersed (from home or remote offices), they’re more likely to be sharing responsibilities of the call center with outside agencies, and they’re juggling a variety of different communications media. The management skills of the past simply don’t apply very much anymore.
There’s also the matter of agent engagement and performance management. Call center jobs are stressful, and many workers report feeling burned out or disinterested in their jobs. Disengaged employees lead to poor customer service, and poor customer service leads to lost customers and damage to the brand.
Cloud-based call center platform provider TCN, Inc. recently announced the launch of “The Complete Guide to Managing Call Center Agents,” a free online resource for call center managers.
“Managing a busy call center is no easy task, which is why we’ve created our online guide to help managers unlock their agents' soft and hard skills that are essential to developing powerful customer experiences,” said McKay Bird, chief marketing officer at TCN. “Call center agents are an integral part of customer service and it’s vital that they feel valued and acknowledged in order to best serve customers.”
TCN’s online guide offers strategies and best practices for keeping call center agents engaged and working efficiently. These include onboarding and ongoing training of agents, leveraging automated customer service technology tools, listening to agent feedback, nurturing agent/customer relationships, offering performance incentives, exceeding customer expectations and managing remote and work-from-home (WFH) agents.
The guide also outlines how modern call center tools such as workforce optimization and workforce management can assist with agent coaching and agent performance, including the use of voice and speech analytics, business intelligence and key performance indicator (KPI) data. It explains the power of gamification in the call center workplace to enhance the daily workflow of call center agents, how to use post-call surveys of customers to generate constructive feedback and how to manage compliance issues, especially the regulations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), through the training and management of agents.
Edited by Luke Bellos