A productive call center is a busy place – call monitoring, strategy meetings, trainings, client calls, reporting and agent development each and every day. You have to be flexible, hard working and have a strong work ethic to make it in the fast pace environment of a successful call center. I find it fascinating when I hear of other telemarketing firms and how their call centers are structured. Two of the most critical positions in our call center are Program Directors and Operations Supervisors. Not every telemarketing firm has these roles (or they have one or the other) and I’d like to share their importance and address the need for each role as you assess your current demand generation team internally or the vendor you may be currently using (or evaluating).
I like to describe the Program Director role as the center point of the continuum. They coordinate most of the activities around a campaign and are critical to a program launching successfully. We talk a lot about the importance of a strong message, value prop and the balance between open and closed ended questions. The Program Director coordinates a thorough due diligence process with the client to understand the goals, objectives and key components to uncover qualified opportunities. They facilitate discussions and create an effective call guide for the agents to use in order to have the most productive conversations with current and potential customers. Not only are they the liaison with the client but also they ultimately ensure client satisfaction and effective communication throughout the process. Program Directors are also the link between departments to ensure the timeliness of deliverables, report ROI, program analysis, trends, message strategy and the final quality assurance of records.
Our Operations Supervisors are with the agents on the call center floor to offer daily monitoring, coaching and on the spot training. They are able to handle questions that may come up and require immediate attention. The supervisor plays an integral role in improving agents’ phone techniques and the ability to generate the most quality information on each call. It important to reward and offer daily encouragement to your agents and the supervisors are able to fill that role by working side by side with the team. You should always remember that in order to maintain performance on a campaign that may have been running for quite some time and also those campaigns just getting off of the ground, it is especially important to have someone actively driving and initiating the training and development of those agents. The Operations Supervisor meets daily with the Program Director in order to gather feedback from the agents regarding what they are hearing from the market, to plan calibration sessions to gauge the success of the campaign and also to discuss strategic actions that need to be taken in order to maintain success.
By having a perfectly balanced team, you will be well on your way to running a successful campaign and have a team that will ultimately provide you excellent recommendations and program analysis throughout the process!