Your Contact Centre Superhero

Your contact centre is a superhero? You might be surprised—after all, contact centres are often:

• Under-valued by the larger organisation
• Under-funded
• Viewed purely as a cost centre
• The first place budget is cut when the need arises
• And staffed by entry-level employees

Not exactly the standard definition for a superhero. But for customer-centric organisations, the term “contact centre superhero” is an accurate—and multi-faceted—description. It’s up to you whether or not you endow your contact centre with exceptional, superhuman abilities, so your company truly can become customer-centric.

Profile of a Contact Centre Superhero

The heart of a customer-centric organisation is the contact centre. This is the frontline to your customers, the source and sustenance for the customer intelligence lifeblood critical to your success. Companies that are superheroes:

• Analyse and leverage the vital customer information cultivated by the contact centre because they recognise its value to other departments and the business at large
• Foster an environment of empowerment, not an environment of fear, where agents are confident it’s okay to make a mistake, as long as they learn from it and move forward
• Defend their contact centre budgets—they no longer discount their contact centres as just phone centres or a cost centres
• Constantly tend to and nourish their contact centres and its members
• Provide ongoing mentorship and emotional intelligence development opportunities
• Teach agents the art of giving and receiving feedback, including how to have a candid conversation with their boss

The Men and Women Behind the Scenes

It makes sense that superhero contact centres need to be staffed by exceptional people with distinct skill sets. These stellar agents:

• Possess a natural affinity for customer service
• Can quickly make logical, reasonable decisions
• Consistently deliver more than what’s asked or expected of them
• Yearn for more authority to make decisions and take risks in the spirit of what’s in the best interest of the customer
• Decipher intonations and subtle signals from customers that others tend to miss
• Easily recognise others who have the potential to be stellar agents
• Keep their humanity by using their energy in a good way

And, as you can imagine, it takes a special kind of leader to create and maintain a superhero contact centre staffed by superhero agents.

These leaders:

• Can communicate the business value and far-reaching, positive business impact of their contact centre
• Fight for funding when needed
• Are on a continuous quest to make agents’ jobs easier
• Personally connect with the agents
• Are genuinely interested in the contact centre workforce and how to optimise its operations
• Keep alive the original spark or energy within each agent that inspired the leader to hire them in the first place
• Contain the contact centre environment while allowing agents to be themselves
• Know that how they make agents feel is exponentially more important than the job titles they hold
• Tap superstar agents to mentor newer agents

Brad Snedeker

Brad Snedeker is the Director of Customer Advocacy at Calabrio. With over 15 years in the industry, Brad has extensive knowledge of the contact center space. As Calabrio’s head of the Innovation Center, he works directly with users to teach and develop new and innovative techniques to implement customer engagement and WFO best practices.