Call Center Supervisor

While call center agents handle inbound and outbound calls and interact with customers and prospects, call center supervisors oversee a team of agents and ensure that the entire call center operates efficiently and meets its customer service and performance goals. But there’s much more to it than just overseeing the day-to-day activities of call center reps.

Call center supervisors need to be subject matter experts, excellent coaches, motivators, team leaders, and performance evaluators. And they are also facing a number of challenges that make the role more complicated and demanding than it might seem. In this guide, we’ll dig deeper into the key responsibilities of call center supervisors and the skills and software tools they need to succeed in the role.

Who is a Call Center Supervisor?

Call center supervisors play a crucial role within call centers. They lead, engage, train, and manage a team of call center reps in their day-to-day operations, ensuring that the team performs at its maximum potential. Most call center supervisors start as call center agents and eventually get promoted to supervisors by demonstrating excellent performance, management, and leadership skills. When it comes to managing customer service teams, supervisors ensure the team provides the level of service today’s consumers have come to expect.

Key Responsibilities of Call Center Supervisors

Supervising daily team activities 

Overseeing the day-to-day activities of a call center team is one of the basic call center supervisor responsibilities. That may include task allocation, creating and managing schedules to ensure adequate coverage across all shifts, and dealing with other operational and organizational issues. Supervisors may also be involved in the creation of call center scripts for outbound calls or inbound customer service interactions.

Handling escalated issues

Even though 83% of customers expect to solve complex problems by speaking to one person when they call customer support, according to research from Salesforce, that’s not always possible. Sometimes agents have to escalate customer calls, whether because they lack the expertise or authority to resolve the issue or simply because the customer demands escalation. It’s the duty of a call center supervisor to handle escalated calls and ensure customer requests are resolved efficiently no matter the complexity of the issue. Additionally, supervisors may be responsible for collecting and analyzing customer feedback and identifying improvement opportunities.

Hiring and onboarding

Call center supervisors are often involved in the hiring process, including resume filtering, interviewing, and the final candidate selection. And once newly hired reps join the team, supervisors are responsible for the onboarding process. Based on research by the Brandon Hall Group for Glassdoor, organizations with a strong onboarding process can improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%. In call centers, where employee turnover rates are usually high, efficient onboarding is one of the keys to better retention – and a good call center supervisor must be able to make that process smooth and effective.

Ongoing training and coaching

Supervisors train and coach agents. Continuous training and coaching are critical to ensuring agents are able to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently, helping you increase First Call Resolution (FCR) rates, reduce the Average Handle Times (AHT), and improve Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT). And it also impacts workplace satisfaction and engagement. In fact, according to Axonify’s State of Workplace Training study, 92% of employees say that the right kind of workplace training impacts their job engagement positively.

QA and agent performance evaluation

Conducting regular QA (quality assurance) reviews and performance evaluation procedures is an important part of the supervisor’s responsibilities. Call center quality assurance involves evaluating the quality of customer interactions based on certain predefined criteria. For example, as a call center supervisor, you might want to evaluate how well your reps adhere to your service quality standards and compliance guidelines, whether they follow scripts, or how efficient they are in resolving complex issues.

In addition to evaluating the overall quality of customer interactions, call center supervisors can also assess the performance of individual representatives based on traditional call center metrics and KPIs like First Call Resolution (FCR) rate, the Average Handle Time (AHT), Escalation rate, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Conversion rate, and other metrics.

For a comprehensive understanding, you can read more about:

• 10 Outbound Call Center Metrics Your Call Center Should Measure.
• 16 Inbound Call Center Metrics and KPIs You Should Track.

Maintaining engagement, morale, and motivation

Call center jobs are known to be intense and stressful. Agents often have to handle heated situations, resolve complaints, and deal with angry or abusive customers. At the same time, they are expected to be highly productive and consistently meet their performance targets while also delivering outstanding experiences with every customer interaction. It’s the duty of a call center supervisor to foster a positive, collaborative, supportive, and stress-free workplace environment and ensure that agents remain engaged and motivated despite all the challenges of the job.

Feedback exchange and recognition

A call center supervisor is also responsible for collecting feedback from the team members and providing ongoing feedback to them. This is usually done through one-on-one meetings. On top of that, regularly recognizing agents, whether for excellent performance or day-to-day input, is an important duty of call center supervisors. Not only does regular recognition increase engagement and motivation, but it can also help reduce employee turnover. Research from Achievers Workforce Institute revealed that workplace recognition is the second biggest reason for employees to stay with their current employer.

Reporting and admin duties

Call center supervisors are typically responsible for preparing and presenting reports and analytics on team performance to senior management. In addition, there are also many other admin duties supervisors may be involved in. That may include setting team goals and objectives, developing and maintaining standard operating procedures (SOPs) and compliance guidelines, establishing customer service standards, creating and regularly updating internal knowledge base, etc.

Must-have Skills for a Call Center Supervisor

• Communication skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills are critical for call center supervisors. Being able to clearly convey instructions, provide feedback to direct reports, and handle customer escalations are must-have abilities for supervisors.
• People management skills: These may include the ability to assign tasks and responsibilities to agents appropriately, build and maintain positive relationships with team members and customers, and foster a collaborative and supportive workplace environment.
• Leadership skills: Naturally, an excellent call center supervisor should possess the traits of a leader and act as a motivator for their team members. The ability to inspire, lead, and guide agents towards achieving common goals is what helps supervisors keep the team engaged and motivated.
• Conflict resolution skills: Conflicts are inevitable in call centers. Dissatisfaction with the products, unrealistic expectations, billing disputes, and service failures are just a few causes of conflict in customer service, not to mention conflicts among team members. Conflict resolution skills are essential for supervisors to handle these situations effectively.
• Strategic thinking skills: Strategic thinking skills are important for supervisors to be able to set realistic and achievable long-term goals for the team that align with the overall strategy of the organization, as well as allocate and schedule resources efficiently to maintain service level while also avoiding agent burnout.
• Decision-making skills: Call centers are typically fast-paced environments. Whether it’s resolving workplace conflicts, shifting priorities, or handling escalated customer issues – supervisors must be willing to take responsibility and make well-informed and timely decisions whenever necessary.
• Multitasking skills: Call center supervisors have a range of various duties and responsibilities to handle, very often simultaneously. That makes multitasking a highly desirable skill for supervisors, enabling them to manage multiple tasks effectively without compromising on the quality of what they do.

Software Tools for a Call Center Center Supervisor

Call center software

Among the different software tools used by supervisors, call center software is the foundation of their tech stack. While various call center solutions may offer different features and capabilities to help supervisors manage their teams effectively, let’s explore some of the key features of call center software tools that are particularly helpful for the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of contact center supervisors:

• Real-time call monitoring: Real-time call monitoring software enables supervisors to listen in on active calls and monitor how their team members interact with customers or prospects. For example, by monitoring your support team’s calls, you can gain insights into how your support reps handle customer issues, deal with complaints, or adhere to compliance requirements. Similarly, by monitoring your sales team’s calls, you can hear first-hand how well your sales reps present your sales pitch or follow sales scripts. Based on that, you can identify agent knowledge or skills gaps and improvement opportunities.
• Call whispering: With live call whispering, supervisors can join in on active calls and speak to agents without the customer or prospect on the other end hearing anything or being aware of the supervisor’s presence. It enables you to provide on-the-fly directions and guide your new hires on how to best handle each interaction without disrupting the flow of the conversation. This is an excellent call coaching feature that can help you streamline your onboarding process and help newly hired agents gain experience and confidence faster.
• Live dashboard: Through a live dashboard, supervisors get complete visibility into what’s happening in their call center in real time, enabling them to stay on top of their call center operations. For example, you can see active calls, missed calls, calls in queue, abandoned calls, agent statuses, and more. Some software solutions will also allow you to set instant alerts for predefined events, such as high call volumes or SLA breaches, so you can take immediate action whenever needed.
• Call reporting: With call center reporting features, supervisors can track various metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), such as First Call Resolution rates, the Average Speed of Answer, Average Call Transfer, Call Abandonment Rate, Customer Satisfaction Scores, and more. Typically, you can choose from ready-made reports or create custom reports and track specific metrics and KPIs that are most relevant and important to your business. By reviewing historical reports, you can easily identify common issues, trends, and opportunities to improve and make better data-driven decisions.

Speech analytics software

Speech analytics software solutions, also known as call center quality assurance software, empower call center managers and supervisors with much deeper insights into call center operations and agent performance while also enabling them to automate and optimize the entire call center quality assurance process.

Tip: With VoiceSpin AI Speech Analyzer, you can monitor 100% of customer calls and evaluate each interaction based on specific predefined rules and criteria. With AI-generated call summaries and custom metrics, you can evaluate the quality of customer calls and measure the performance of every call center agent without having to spend hours reviewing call recordings and transcriptions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system

In call centers, CRM systems serve as a centralized database that stores all customer information and details of every interaction, including each customer’s contact details, interaction history, preferences, purchase history, call recordings, and other valuable data. Whenever supervisors need to handle escalated calls, they can easily retrieve all the available information about the customer from the CRM system and use that data to provide efficient, contextually relevant, and personalized support.

Workforce management software (WFM)

Workforce management (WFM) software solutions help supervisors create and manage agent schedules, ensuring adequate coverage during peak and off-peak hours and efficient resource utilization. With WFM solutions, you can also use historical data to forecast future call volumes and staffing needs. That is especially critical during seasonal call volume spikes. Additionally, WFM software tools can assist supervisors with attendance tracking, schedule adherence monitoring, and intraday management.

Major Challenges a Call Center Supervisor May Face

High agent turnover rates

Due to the demanding nature of the job, call centers have a high employee turnover rate. And this is one of the major challenges supervisors and managers have to deal with. While the industry standard for call center turnover is around 30-40%, some call centers have agent turnover as high as over 200%, according to research by SQM Group.

When turnover happens, that may disrupt your regular operations and negatively affect service quality and team morale. It is also time-consuming and costly to recruit, train, and retain newly hired agents. Implementing robust training programs, providing professional development and career advancement opportunities, and investing in employee retention are some of the ways to reduce turnover.

Remote team supervision

Even though the pandemic is over, remote work continues to dominate the workplace in contact centers. According to a report from Deloitte, nearly 70% of contact centers still have a work-from-home program in place, and 73% expect to have a work-from-home program in place within two years.

Managing agents working remotely presents unique challenges for supervisors. Firstly, it can be difficult to maintain clear and consistent communication and high engagement and motivation levels when teams are dispersed. Secondly, it might be hard to measure performance and conduct effective training sessions remotely. Luckily, remote-ready call center software solutions like VoiceSpin can help you overcome these challenges, enabling you to manage remote team members effectively.

Maintaining high service quality

Over the recent years, consumers have raised the bar on what they expect from companies when they reach out for customer support. Salesforce research revealed that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services for 84% of customers. At the same time, 73% of customers say one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies.

Increasing customer expectations make it challenging to deliver consistent and high-quality service. By constantly monitoring agent performance and the quality of customer service interactions and conducting regular training and targeted coaching sessions, supervisors can maintain service quality, ensuring customers get the service they have come to expect from brands.

Book a demo call now to learn more about VoiceSpin’s AI-first call center software solutions and how you can leverage them to improve the experience for your customers, call center agents, and supervisors.