In most call centers, over two-thirds of operating costs are directed to personnel. As the largest single investment of your call center, staffing and scheduling efficiencies are paramount to securing a healthy bottom line.

Call center workforce management is a complex process. Optimizing frontline staff’s performance while reducing costs is an ongoing concern, one of the most important in any call center’s planning and management functions.

There are many indicators that can help you manage your call center’s workforce. And while a close monitoring of all key indicators is important to the health of your enterprise, the single most important element to success is customer satisfaction.

Workforce Management Is About Agent And Customer Satisfaction

In the rush of day-to-day operations, the critical role of agents’ job satisfaction can easily fall off the radar. But amid the needs to schedule and train staff efficiently, there needs to be room to promote staff morale.

There’s hard data supporting the need to have happy call center staff. The SQM Group found that for every 1% increase in job satisfaction for employees, there followed a 2% increase in customer satisfaction.

It’s clear that your call center’s staff moral is an investment that yields a solid return.

How Workforce Management Can Promote A Happy Call Center Team

Any manager of a call center knows that when it comes to frontline staff, every individual has a tremendous impact on reaching service goals. Maximized efficiency means that there is no shaky wheel on the cart. 100% motivated team members actively invested in meeting performance goals is simply the most efficient way to have the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

Here are a few of the foundational components necessary to promoting a committed call center team.

1. Keep your ears open. Always. Listen to your staff, and take what the say seriously. The thrust of their concerns or their victories may not always be actionable from a managerial standpoint, but you provide powerful impetus to motivation if you are ready to listen to your team. It’s about dignity: showing concern for your staff is the beginning of a process of trust and mutual respect. Once it’s there, listening reaffirms it.

2. Mentor Your Team. As a manager, it’s all too easy to forget that you are much, much more than ‘just a boss.’ You’re a call center’s mentor, your team’s coach, their teacher. Being there to offer suggestions and encouragement, or to give the praise due to a job well done is the difference between red tape and making a difference to staff performance.

Training is an important part of mentoring. When staff struggle, you need to be there to support them with training options to get them through a rough spot. Your role as a leader can make what seems like drudgery into a potential to greater job satisfaction for your team. Whether teaching new skills or polishing old ones, excellent call center workforce management has mentoring as its core.

3. Make Agents The Heart Of Every Process.  Practical perspective is priceless to crafting any new policy. Including staff in planning policies or changes that will affect them is important. By allowing them to give advice you work towards promoting respect and trust.

A policy that is the result of collaboration is more likely to implement and function well. Be sure to share feedback with staff so they can see what works, and what doesn’t. You’re validating the process when assessment is shared with your team – even when a new initiative fails.

A successful relationship between management and staff turns every negative into a positive.