What is a Supervisor?
A contact center supervisor is responsible for leading a team of customer service agents. The supervisor position is challenging because they need to be motivators, coaches, subject matter experts, diplomats, data analysts, and multi-taskers. Where do contact centers find people with these qualities? They often promote strong agents and then give them the training and development they need to become strong supervisors.
If you shadowed a supervisor on a typical day, here are some of the activities you would see them doing:
Coaching - a supervisor's most important responsibility is to develop the agents on their team and coaching is a primary way of doing that. They might coach agents about their operational stats, a call they just listened to, or the latest quality results. There's no shortage of coaching topics in a contact center.
Monitoring - effective supervisors try to spend part of their day monitoring contacts so they're on top of their team's performance. They might listen in on live phone calls or do a side-by-side with an agent. And then, of course, they will coach about their observations. It can be very helpful to enable supervisors to monitor on-the-go by providing an interface they can use on a mobile device. That way, they can roam the floor while still monitoring all agents and queues.
Reviewing performance statistics - contact centers literally measure everything, and often down to the agent and team level. Good supervisors own their team's results and take action when they're not hitting their goals.
Motivating - motivating is critical for agent engagement and retention. Supervisors often plan fun activities like competitions and team parties to pump up team spirit. Performance Management (PM) solutions can help supervisors with the motivational aspect of their job. PM often includes gamification, which helps motivate agents by using Contact Center KPIs to create challenges or have agents collect rewards electronically via dashboards where agents can see all their KPIs and engage online in friendly competition with their colleagues.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it illustrates that supervisors have a lot on their plates. Supervisors are critical to a contact center's success and high performing ones are worth their weight in gold.
How NICE can help
We provide tools to help supervisors successfully monitor, motivate and develop their teams.
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.