What is a Supervisor?

A contact center supervisor is responsible for leading a team of customer service agents. The position is challenging because supervisors need to be motivators, coaches, subject matter experts, diplomats, data analysts, and multi-taskers. Contact centers often promote strong agents, and then give them the training and development they need to become strong supervisors.

Here are some of the activities a supervisor carries out during a typical day:

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. Supervisors using an appropriate interface on a mobile device 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: Motivation 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) applications can help supervisors with the motivational aspect of their job. Such solutions often include gamification, which helps motivate agents with contact center KPI challenges and rewards, as well as dashboards where agents can see all their KPIs and engage 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 and are critical to a contact center's success.