The second of 4 Essential Ingredients for Supervisor Success: Time to develop agent talent.

Customer service supervisors are problem-solvers. Most spend their day in reactive firefighting mode — handling urgent issues, responding to agent questions and correcting behavior when needed.

The problem with firefighting is that it doesn’t work any more.
According to a 2009 report by the Customer Care Council of the five supervisory personas they studied, the Firefighters not only turned in the worst performance, they “actively degraded team performance.”

There is a better way to coach. Over the last 5 years I’ve made it my mission to design an alternative coaching process that reduces agent dependency on their supervisor for answers. An approach that focuses on building agent confidence and their sense of self-efficacy. I call it “Intentional Coaching.”

Even though this coaching model is based on common sense (encourage more of what’s right about agent performance than what’s wrong, put more responsibility on the agent to do their job) and looks simple enough (spend more time on the floor), actually making the transition out of reactive mode to using this more proactive, intentional approach requires the center’s leadership team to think and act differently.

The biggest challenge: Supervisors need to spend 50% to 70% of time out on the floor.
For some managers arranging for their supervisors to spend the majority of their day out on the floor with their team is no problem. But for others, this change requires a reshuffling of call center priorities.

7 Top Tips
for Increasing Coaching Face Time for Supervisors  

1. There is time to coach, you just need to find it.
   Analyze how supervisors spend their day now. Managers are often shocked when they see the amount of time that is wasted on activities that could be/should be performed by someone else, or eliminated entirely.
2. Determine if a supervisor really needs to serve on that outside committee.
   Managers sometimes don’t realize how many total hours their supervisors spend going to meetings outside the center — precious time that could be invested in adding value to their teams.
3. Inform the agents of the change and how it will benefit them. 
   Agents who only get a one-to-one coaching session when something is wrong, will be a bit leery when their supervisor pulls up a chair, jacks in and at the end of a call withholds comment and asks them to critique it themselves.
4. Schedule coaching time and hold those times sacred.
   The best way to assure that supervisors spend at least half their day exclusively on intentional coaching is to put those hours on their schedule. Once the schedule is up and running make sure the supervisors aren’t getting diverted to something else.
5. Stick to coaching during coaching time.
   When agents approach their supervisor with a question while they are engaged in their coaching sessions, refer urgent matters to a lead or ask them to wait until after the coaching session. “Lisa, I can’t help you right now, I’m in the middle of my coaching time…”  
6. Gradually increase the amount of coaching time.
   If a supervisor currently spends only 10% of their time doing on-the-floor coaching, start with adding one or two hours a day until they reach a minimum of 50%.
7. Coordinate supervisor schedules. 
   For a supervisor to spend from 9 to 11:30 AM engaged in nothing but chair side and “in the moment” coaching, other supervisors will need be there to cover emergencies.

Make it a great week.

2012 Copyright Barbara Burke & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Use with permission.

The first of 4 Essential Ingredients
for Supervisor Success:

#1. Accountability for employee engagement survey scores.

Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a survey process that helps companies understand customer expectations and determine whether their service is hitting the mark.

Why not capture the Voice of the Agent? If you are serious about helping call center leaders meet the needs of their agents so that they will “happily apply their discretionary effort to create the best possible customer experience” (my definition of a fully engaged employee), it makes sense to deploy a survey to gauge how your supervisors are doing.

After conducting thousands of engagement surveys and using the data to help supervisors get even better at what they do, I am convinced that engagement survey results should be on every supervisor’s performance scorecard.                                                                              

10 Tried and True Tips

Getting the most from your
Voice of the Agent Engagement Survey 

1. Decide on the purpose of the survey.
Surveys provide supervisors with a realistic snapshot of how their direct reports feel about the support they are currently receiving from them.

2. Determine how you will use the survey results.
Use the employee feedback to help supervisors identify the many things their reps like about what they do to support them and to pinpoint a few specific behaviors they can change or improve.

3. Understand the implied obligation.
Never conduct a survey without sharing a summary of the results with the respondents and your plan for using the data to make things better.

7. Use the initial survey to obtain a “before” snapshot of the current situation.
The initial survey is a bit like the contestants weighing in on the show, The Biggest Loser. The data provides the baseline on which supervisors measure their progress. Plan on conducting the same survey at regular intervals.

8. Use the results to pinpoint the supervisors’ strengths and specific areas in which they need additional training.
Supervisors use what they learned to create a short list of specific actions they plan to take between the first survey and the second, follow up survey.

9. The results will reveal the need for supervisors to sharpen their communication skills.
In the vast majority of cases, supervisors discover a misalignment between the approach they have relied on for years (some variation of “command and control”) with what today’s employees say they need — a more individualized coaching and mentoring approach tailored to the unique needs of each person.

10. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of the the engagement survey.
While survey results are an important and useful data point, the ultimate goal of these surveys is to help your supervisors give their reps the support they need so that they in turn will happily apply their discretionary effort to benefit your customers.

Look for the next Monday Aha! on 2/20/12. The topic will be the second Essential Ingredient for Supervisor Success: Time. Learn why supervisors need to spend more of their day out on the floor with their reps.

Have a great week.

Barbara
Copyright 2012 Barbara Burke. All rights reserved.
The Aha! above is one of 22 Aha!s found in my customer service fable, The Napkin, The Melon & The Monkey.

More coach and mentor than cop and enforcer, these enlightened leaders drive engagement — and results.

For customer-centric companies like Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and Nordstrom’s creating high employee engagement is a core business strategy. According to recent research by the Ascent Group on customer service success, the most highly rated companies focus on the human aspect of customer care. Ascent says, “People matter. Engaged employees are the key to excellent customer service. Engaged employees are employees who feel as though they are truly valued at work; that their efforts directly contribute towards the mission and success of the company.”

Quality supervision is a key driver of employee engagement. What makes supervisors who have highly-engaged employees different, is how they view their relationship with their direct reports. Rather than seeing themselves as an enforcer of performance; they consider their role as a manager and developer of front-line talent. While conventional supervisors rate the person and develop the performance, this new breed of supervisor does just the opposite – they rate the performance and develop the person. The most effective leaders believe that every person is different and should be treated as such.

Four Essential Ingredients for Supervisor Success

1. Accountability for results (engagement survey scores)
2. Time to spend with their reps.
3. Specialized training in engagement-building skills.
4. Creative communication tools.

Copyright 2012 Barbara Burke. All rights reserved.