Call Centre and Customer Service Managers
Organise and control the operations of call and contact centres, administer and review customer services, and maintain sound customer relations.
The morning after the storm
You are the contact centre manager at an energy retailer, the morning after a storm, with a queue that is three times its normal length. It is 7am. Power has been out for thousands of households overnight, and every agent is already on a call. The wall screen shows the queue growing, and a few people need your attention now.
Choose what you would do. Then see what happens. There are often good reasons for each choice.
Half my team is saying the callers are shouting at them, and two of them want to take a break. If they leave, the queue will blow out. I do not know what to tell them.
Let anyone who needs a short break take one in turn, and put a recorded message on the line to explain the outage
The queue grows by a few, but the message answers half of the callers' questions without an agent. The team is calmer and the afternoon goes better.
Tell Dwayne to decide, and you will back whatever he chooses
Dwayne picks a middle path that works, but he is left carrying a decision that was yours to set up. Backing a team leader is good, and so is giving clear guidance.
Ask them to hold on until the queue drops, because customers are waiting
Two agents have rough calls in a row and one leaves the floor in tears. A burnt-out team gets slower, not faster. Short breaks are part of keeping the line open.
I have been on hold for an hour. My husband is on a medical device at home that needs power, and I have been told nothing. I want to speak to a manager and I want a real answer, not a script.
Take the call yourself, listen, check whether the household is registered as needing priority support, and tell her exactly what you will do
Ruth is calmer after talking to you and you arrange a priority call back, but you have been on one call while five more escalations wait. Taking on the hard call is right and it comes at a cost.
Take the call yourself, and also ask a senior agent to monitor the other escalations in the meantime
Ruth gets a real answer and a priority contact. The senior agent holds the other escalations. You solved her problem and kept the floor covered.
Ask the agent to read Ruth the standard outage message and offer a call back
Ruth hangs up angrily and calls back twice more. The standard script is not enough when someone's safety is involved. Know when a customer needs a person, not a script.
The numbers this morning look terrible. Average call time is up and we are missing every target. I need you to get the handle time down by lunchtime, whatever it takes.
Say nothing and hope the numbers improve on their own once the outage ends
The queue eventually clears, but Nick has been told nothing and starts making decisions about your team without your input. Silence leaves others to tell your story.
Tell agents to end calls faster, regardless of whether the customer's problem is resolved
The call times drop, but repeat calls shoot up because problems were not fixed. The queue is worse by evening. A fast call that fails the customer just comes back.
Explain the outage is driving the numbers, and propose reporting it separately
Nick understands once he sees the explanation. You agree to track storm calls separately and share the real picture upward. Honest numbers are better than convenient ones.
How it went
By evening the queue is back to normal, and the team has eaten and gone home. Managing a contact centre means caring about customers and agents at the same time, and arguing for both when the numbers say otherwise. Would you be comfortable standing between the two?
This is a simplified, fictional situation to help you explore. It is not professional instruction or a test of your ability.
Case study: The call that took forty minutes
A fictional case set in a fictional contact centre for an energy retailer, with a floor of agents on headsets and a wall screen showing the queue.
The situation
Joanna Pereira managed a contact centre for Bright Valley Energy. Her team was measured on how quickly each call was finished. One agent, Sebastian, had a call that went on for forty minutes, which pushed his average well above the others and flagged on her dashboard. She was asked by her own manager to talk to him about it. She had not yet listened to the call.
What they did
Joanna listened to the recording before speaking to Sebastian. An older customer had been confused by a bill, unable to afford a large catch-up payment and close to tears. Sebastian had stayed on the line, set up a hardship option and made sure she understood it. Joanna told him it was the best call she had heard that month. She then went to her manager and asked that the dashboard stop treating such calls as failures.
How it turned out
The manager agreed to flag calls for a review rather than a penalty. Sebastian relaxed, and other agents began spending more time where it was needed. Joanna said that metrics help her see the floor, but they do not replace listening.
What would you do?
- Why did Joanna listen to the call before talking to Sebastian?
- How would you decide when a long call is good and when it is a problem?
- What might go wrong when a team is judged only on speed?