Supervisor Training: Status Quo Is No Longer Safe

Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - March 2008
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Frontline supervisors play a key role in the call center’s success. But in many organizations, the hiring and training processes (or lack of) are hindering new supervisors’ chances for success.

As recently as 2004, companies were beginning to allocate more funds for call center supervisor training, according to results from an ICMI survey. Unfortunately, the current economic climate may slow down — or even reduce — that commitment.

“It’s tight right now, with a pending recession,” says Anne Nickerson, founder of Call Center Coach, a training and consulting firm. “The first thing that usually goes is training.” Nickerson analyzed the results for the 2004 report, The Current State of Supervisor Training.

Savvy managers and executives realize the true value of the call center supervisor’s role, and invest in it in the most efficient and meaningful way. Supervisor training that goes beyond industry-recognized skill sets is going to be more important as call centers take on a more prominent role in contributing to companies’ bottom lines.

Many companies promote supervisors from within their call center agent or sales rep ranks, usually pegging their top performers as the perfect candidates. But keep in mind, newly promoted supervisors are moving from a scripted, managed environment to one in which they write the scripts and do the managing.

“Agents may communicate well with customers, but how about with the people they’re managing — their former peers — and with upper management?” asks Nickerson. She says that some of the top areas of concern for a new supervisor include: how to run a call center (e.g., hiring, staffing, scheduling issues); how to evaluate agents and work through performance issues; how to manage conflict; and how to reach the customer satisfaction goals set by the center and/or organization.

The move is not one that everyone can make successfully — at least not without the right type of support.

Offering supervisor training and development is a good start, says Rebecca Gibson, principal consultant of Learning Currents and an ICMI-certified associate. “Many of them are green; a lot of them are first-time managers. It’s a high-pressure job,” she says. “But without executive leadership’s willingness to look at the position and conduct a job analysis, it’s not realistic to assume that you’ll get better results from training.”

Familiarity Can Breed Failure

The hiring or promotion stage is, perhaps, the most crucial time to consider the types of training you have to offer new supervisors. Nickerson finds that only about 50 percent of agent skills are transferable to the role of call center supervisor. They have to make up that deficit somewhere, somehow.

Nickerson points out that many companies that promote supervisors from within the frontline ranks typically have in place stringent requirements for competencies, interviews, and preemployment tests for outside candidates. “They still use these for employees from within, because of nondiscrimination issues, but they don’t use the data the same way,” she says.

When a company recently asked Nickerson to review its candidates for a call center supervisor position, she realized that the company was blind to the weaknesses of its internal people who were up for the job.

While the managers at the company believed that they knew from experience the strengths and weaknesses of its in-house candidates, Nickerson focused only on the necessary skills and strengths that the position would require.

She asked managers to give examples of the veteran agents’ problem-solving skills, and when and where they’d used them.

“They couldn’t think of one,” says Nickerson. “They were great reps, great order-takers, but they always transferred the calls when problems came up. Most supervisors are problem-solving 80 percent of the day.”

The three essential skills for call center supervisors, she says, are problem-solving, customer focus and communication.

“If they don’t have those top three strengths, you’re going to have to work very hard with them, or you’ll be putting them in a no-success situation.”

Gibson agrees. “Every third supervisor hire should be someone from outside the company with different experience. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of, ‘We’ve always done it this way. We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work.’”

Most managers have similar reasons for wanting to hire from within, Gibson says. For instance, in some cases, the company wants to create an advancement opportunity for agents. However, oftentimes, the preference to hire from within comes from a desire to maintain status quo.

“A lot of managers don’t want to sit down and talk,” says Gibson. “They don’t hire supervisors who are good leaders; they hire ‘yes’ people — the agents who everybody likes. And, generally, they’re likeable because they have a hard time challenging management.

“I’d love to hear of a supervisor who came to his or her manager and said, “You know, I took escalated calls all day and I don’t think this is a good use of my time. Here’s why. What are we going to do about it? Here’s a suggestion I have.”

But most supervisors just take the calls and struggle to meet the goals and implement the programs that managers pass along to them.

“When that happens,” Gibson adds, “you’re not really growing. And you’re not developing future leaders who can move beyond the role of supervisor.”

Training Alone Is Not Enough

Classroom, e-learning, seminars and/or self-study training can be effective methods for transferring knowledge — making it stick is another matter.

“The first time a new supervisor gets stuck on the job, all of that learning goes out of that window,” says Nickerson. She insists on coaching as a followup to training, either on site or over the phone.

Mentoring is another effective way to accomplish this followup in-house — but who mentors, and how, is key.

Most mentoring takes the form of on-the-job shadowing, says Gibson, which is unlikely to reveal all of the mechanics at work in the typical call center supervisor’s day. Simply watching another manager or supervisor perform their job functions doesn’t provide a clear understanding of all that’s involved with the job. “We often overestimate what’s transparent,” she says.

It takes a great amount of time and determination on the manager’s part to make sure that new supervisors — and even veterans — are learning what they need to succeed and to help the call center satisfy its mission.

Barbara Bartolucci, call center and authorization manager at Jefferson Radiology in Hartford, Conn., trains her supervisors to not only lead their teams, but to do her job, as well. The radiology practice call center isn’t huge, she says, but it’s not unusual for agents to handle 4,700 calls in a week, more if there is a scheduling problem or if equipment is down.

“There are key people in the call center who I’m teaching and giving more responsibilities to so that they can supervise when I’m not available,” Bartolucci says. “I’m very willing to share everything I know, as much as I can. When I’m not here, I want the center to run as if I am.”

Most of what she passes along are training and coaching techniques she learned from Nickerson, with whom the company contracts.

Sharing that training has made her more confident that her supervisors can be leaders — and they know that they hold key roles in the chain of command in the call center.

Bartolucci’s sense of involvement in supervisor training is not commonplace. Most managers don’t participate in supervisor training, say Nickerson and Gibson. Nor do they perform an adequate needs assessment of what the problems are and what type of training is best.

It is even rarer that managers and executives view supervisors as valuable assets — not just in meeting goals, but in analyzing barriers and devising strategies.

Bartolucci believes that her efforts to mentor her supervisors and help them to mentor their agents has helped put her call center on the road to success. “We team up new agents with a supervisor,” she says. “Partnering with the supervisor builds stronger relationships among the staff. Agents’ relationship with their supervisor is ongoing.”

Existing in Call Center Limbo

Most supervisors who are promoted from within tend to identify much more strongly with frontline agents than with management, says Gibson. “One day you’re an agent; the next day, you’re a supervisor. Nothing really changes except they move your cube and you have a different set of responsibilities.”

Newly promoted supervisors often find themselves in a veritable no-man’s land: no longer belonging to the frontline ranks, but not welcomed into the management community.

This causes stress for supervisors, says Gibson, which is often exacerbated by management’s insensitivity to frontline staff in their implementation of policies and procedures.

“In many cases, it creates loose cannons: supervisors who don’t agree with company policies or values, and who contradict them to the team,” she says. “That’s usually accompanied by cynicism and a sense of being overburdened. They then build their team around the wrong values, a cohesiveness built on negativity. They’re pushed to meet stats and answer calls, and they don’t really have a perspective on the bigger picture.”

Pulling Supervisors into the Fold

To combat this downward spiral, Nickerson says, managers and executives have to escalate the value of the supervisor within the organization.

“This is the person who is at the table with your customers every day,” she says. “If marketing wants to know what the issues are or how to sell something, if sales wants to know what products are needed, or senior management wants to know why we’re losing customers, ask your call center supervisors, because that’s what they’re working with every day.”

Failing to tap into supervisors’ hands-on knowledge of the customer base costs upper management a lot of valuable insight, says Nickerson.

She adds that grooming supervisors to be more business savvy can take a lot of the strain out of organizationwide communication and free valuable time by streamlining problem-solving in the call center, as well as the analytical process for upper management.

Bartolucci agrees. “Teaching supervisors to pass information up and down is very important. When my supervisors come to me with a problem, we’ll write it up along with  a proposal for how to fix it. They’re learning what to say and with whom to communicate.”

As more and more organizations realize the value the call center has on the bottom line, they should also look at how they are investing in one of the most valuable cogs in the machinery.

Supervisors are the call center’s unsung heroes, says Nickerson. “They really are the glue that holds it all together. They couldn’t do it without the infrastructure of the organization, but organization couldn’t function properly without them either.” 

Measuring the Effectiveness of Supervisor Training

It’s difficult to prove to senior execs that supervisor training is effective and contributes to the overall organization, says Rebecca Gibson, principal consultant at Learning Currents.

If training is available and supervisors are participating, but you’re not seeing results, consider these other factors that might keep performance from improving:

• Compensation

• Work environment

• Perceived value or worth of the job

• Prestige of organization

• Availability of  promotional opportunities

• Understanding of job requirements

Many of these can be eliminated from consideration after an initial needs assessment, but that takes a greater level of commitment.

According to Gibson, companies must ask themselves: Do you value the supervisors? Do you value the function? Are you willing to commit resources (money, time and effort) to it?

Time-Tested Tactics for Your Supervisor Training Toolbox

Consider making the following tactics part of your supervisor training program to improve call center performance, as well as its role in the overall health and growth of your organization.

Enhance Business communication training. Anne Nickerson, founder of the Call Center Coach, recalls one small business that was turned around when the CEO, who also acted as call center manager, taught his supervisors how to present issues and propose solutions precisely.
“He complained that his meetings with supervisors went around in circles,” she says. “I told him, ‘They don’t have an MBA, like you. Teach them how to be more business savvy and meetings will operate more smoothly.”

Nickerson advised the CEO to ask supervisors for three things — 1) two top problems, 2) two top solutions, and 3) two current issues that were frustrating them, which he could help with.

Next, she instructed him to ask his supervisors to estimate the return on the investment — in customer satisfaction, as well as dollars —  for purchasing a new system or equipment that they said they needed. Once they assembled this information, he could show them how to develop a business proposal.
“He did it, and that turned the company around,” says Nickerson. “They were really moving on strategic issues after that.”

Manipulate schedules so that managers can pair with supervisors in training. Learning Currents’ Rebecca Gibson recalls one client that spent $20,000 for her training expertise for its supervisors, “and there was not one manager there.”

She acknowledges that, “it’s the nature of our time-intensive and reactive environment. If supervisors are out of the center attending training, the managers often are on the floor covering for them.”

While such scheduling can be tough, particularly for smaller call centers, offering onsite training is a viable option.
Look for management skills rather than technical skills when hiring or promoting supervisors. “You need to have good hiring practices. Training is, in some ways, secondary to that,” says Gibson.

“What are the skills and competencies they’ll need to succeed? And do your supervisors have them? If not, you need to train them.”
Bring supervisors to the management table. “Call centers are becoming real bottomline assets,” says Nickerson. “It’s the place where the money hits the road.”
In such high-value operations, supervisors are a key cog. Supervisors who have a comprehensive understanding of the organization can help to define the types of call center metrics and data that matter to upper management.

“I compare it to hosting a dinner party,” she adds. “You want to make sure that you invite everyone who can contribute the most to enrich the experience for everybody at the table.”

Be specific about training goals. Many times, corporate training departments fail to partner with the call center management team to conduct a basic training needs analysis to determine the skills supervisors need to reach center and corporate goals, says Gibson.