Traits of the Best Managed Call Centers

Each call center is unique -- but the best share these common characteristics.

Brad Cleveland

What do the best call centers have in common?

While there are myriad factors that contribute to success, I believe there are 12 overarching characteristics that emerge in call centers that consistently outperform others in their respective industries. (These traits are excerpted from the new edition of the book, Call Center Management on Fast Forward).

1. Great call centers have an incessant focus on creating high levels of value for their organizations and customers. The best align their resources, strategy and culture to deliver maximum value on three levels—efficiency, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and contributions to other business units (strategic value).

2. They have a supporting culture. To build their culture, they have a people-first perspective (see next characteristic); they are committed to effective communication; they maintain an up-to-date customer access strategy, which keeps all focused on the same plan; and, they ensure that everyone across the broader organization has an understanding of the call center’s role and contributions.

3. Great call centers know that their people are the key to success. They know that happier employees create better experiences for customers and ultimately, better results for shareholders. And they often believe that motivation is less a matter of directly "motivating" people and more one of creating an environment in which the motivation already resident in each person can flourish.

4. They build plans and services around evolving customer expectations. They are continually redefining plans and reshaping services around those expectations. They know that what worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow.

5. They have an established, collaborative planning process. Largely due to effective planning, great call centers work so well that they are almost transparent. The teams concentrate on delivering the organization’s services, and on building the organization’s value and brand—not on running the call center as the end game. The center runs smoothly, and as a result, higher levels of value are possible.

6. They leverage the key statistics. They focus on a relatively small number of measures and objectives that best support their mission and direction. And they understand that simply tracking high-level measurements won’t inherently improve results. Instead, they work on the factors—the root causes—that cause these outputs to be where they are (see next characteristic).

7. They view the call center as a total process. They recognize the process to be where most quality problems occur— and also where the opportunities for improvement in services and reductions in costs reside. They see customer contact services as an important part of a much bigger process that comprises the organization.

8. They identify the technologies that further the mission of the organization, and implement them with foresight, planning and training. They also recognize that an important (according to the late Peter Drucker, the most important) impact of technology is not the capabilities themselves, but that they require you to organize your processes, information and business more logically.

9. They get the budget and support they need. The best call centers first decide on the objectives they want to achieve. They then allocate the resources necessary to support those objectives, through accurate predictions and calculations, and collaborative planning that involves those who approve funds.

10. Successful call center leaders design an organizational structure that facilitates collaboration among and across job roles and business units. They tap into the principles of good organizational design and revisit their structure often. They continually work on identifying positions they need and defining the responsibilities that go along with each.

11. They are willing to experiment. The most successful call center teams continually review and reassess how they do things and the results they are achieving. They constantly ask themselves questions such as, what can be improved? What assumptions no longer make sense? What can and should be done differently?

12. They see the possibilities. They seem to innately understand that ours is, increasingly, a communication-oriented economy and that great customer contact services have the potential to contribute enormous value for customers and organizations.

In the best managed call centers, you can often feel the energy as soon as you walk in the door (if there is a door, given the trend towards home-based agents). It takes many forms: pride of workmanship, a feeling of community, good planning, and coordination. Everybody knows what the mission is and everybody is pulling in the same direction. The call center “clicks.”

And invariably, these 12 traits are at work.

Please drop me a note with your stories, comments, feedback… I’d love to hear from you.

Brad Cleveland

President, ICMI

As president of ICMI, Brad Cleveland has delivered keynotes, executive briefings and consulting services in over 50 countries. ICMI is part of the CMP family of companies, a global leader in business information services with offices around the world. Brad can be reached at bradc@icmi.com.