By
Susan Hash
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Date Published: July 25, 2022 - Last Updated July 22, 2022
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Comments
Throughout the recent turbulence in the contact center industry, supervisors have remained the first line of defense against an operational meltdown—leading their teams through volatile circumstances while maintaining quality and service levels.
The shift to remote and hybrid environments forced supervisors to suddenly reimagine how to coach, manage, and collaborate with their teams without the benefit of being in the same location. Technology adoption helped bridge the distance and relieve supervisors of labor-intensive manual management tasks, such as monitoring call flow and channel demand, adjusting staffing and workload, and creating reports.
With agents self-managing parts of the scheduling process and automation instantly generating reports, supervisors have been freed up to focus on the more strategic, human side of management. They can spend serious time on developing their teams and identifying new customer demands — two key levers for driving revenue growth.
According to a report by Deloitte Digital, service leaders are finding ways to drive long-term business value by “orchestrating valuable service experiences” and generating direct revenue with personalized offers during the service transaction. Deloitte estimates that the percentage of service leaders whose top priority is increasing revenues will double in the next two years, while the percentage whose top priority is cost reduction will drop by 32%.
What does this mean for supervisors?
With more companies putting in place directives for generating revenue growth in the contact center, the supervisor’s role likewise is primed to transition from driving operational efficiency to helping the company achieve top-line business goals. In fact, supervisors may be your contact center’s greatest untapped resource for customer innovation.
Supervisors have a unique vantage point supporting frontline agents while having an intimate hands-on understanding of operational processes, workflows, and obstacles that hinder an effortless customer experience. To become more strategic, however, many supervisors may need to broaden their perspective. Supervisors often are used to operating within silos—focused solely on the needs of their team.
Analytics may provide the means for supervisors to transition from tactical to strategic. Modern analytics software provides user-friendly business intelligence tools designed to simplify the data, help supervisors and non-analysts quickly identify trends, and draw relevant conclusions.
Contact center analytics can help supervisors uncover valuable insights about CX and revenue impacts, such as:
- Primary and underlying reasons why the customer contacted you
- Processes or performance issues that create points of friction in the customer journey
- Drivers of poor customer sentiment
- Opportunities to deliver proactive service and next-problem resolution
- Intelligence on competitors’ products and services
- Upsell or cross-sell opportunities
- A better understanding of how the words and phrases in your agents’ scripts impact sales and conversion rates
Strategic thinking allows supervisors to see the big picture (revenue growth), understand customer insight and performance data for opportunities to achieve business goals, and connect the dots for their teams. Providing supervisors with the tools to uncover relevant insights and promptly act to improve the customer experience will positively move the needle on revenue growth. Even better, it will give supervisors and career-minded frontline agents a unique opportunity to add value to the business while ensuring their own success and enhancing their skills.