Today, every business around the globe needs a clear supervisor success path to follow based on the competencies of current supervisors that are high performers.

This contact center supervisor “stuff” has become too complicated to leave to chance — particularly if you are trying to have a positive employee and customer experience.

How would you describe your contact center supervisors?

• Ineffective?
• Uncertain?
• Overworked?
• Undertrained?
• Dream Team?

The fact is having high-performing contact center supervisors is no longer an optional extra for organizations, but even the best organizations don’t have time to figure all this stuff out.

So here are some tips on how to build your very own contact center supervisor dream team.

Just think about this information from the Center for Workplace Leadership:

• The frontline is, in many ways, a new frontier where organizations can change the way they respond to the environment.
• Frontline managers are no longer the limbs of an organization but the entire muscular-skeletal system.
• Leadership at the frontline is a competitive advantage that leads to a more profitable, agile organization.
• Frontline leadership, when aggregated to the company level, is just as important as senior leadership.
• As economic volatility increases, frontline leadership capability can have a greater impact on business outcomes than senior leadership.

Make no mistake, Call Center Coach is not only the name of our business — it’s an industry need. According to an Executive Priorities report from Strategic Contact, coaching is the number one priority in contact centers.

In many circles, coaching is all about supervisors coaching agents. But when it comes to supervisors themselves, many of them go uncoached. Most organizations are not developing their frontline leaders, and also are limited in providing ongoing learning opportunities for them. Just as in other industries, frontline leadership development in the contact center industry has been very short-sighted.

So is it really any surprise that only 18% of organizations feel they have a supply of capable employees to fill frontline leadership roles? After all, is it really reasonable to expect the uncoached to be good at being a coach?

When you look further down the path, only 33% of employees say they feel their supervisor is effective. And 80% of employees leave because of the relationship with their immediate supervisor.

So, if there’s not an ample supply of employees to fill supervisor roles and most supervisors are ineffective, and agents leave because of their relationship with their supervisor, this vicious cycle tells us very clearly that the lack of (or ineffective) skill development of the frontline supervisor could be the root cause of this problem.

Just think, would you be engaged if you felt your immediate supervisor was ineffective? If you were a supervisor and your employee engagement skills have not been developed, could you really engage agents?

There’s no guessing needed here. It’s a fact — high-performing supervisors develop future supervisors. The best leaders develop more (and better) leaders and retain more people. Period.

The Supervisor Journey

It’s both wonderful and frightening to know that 59% of contact center supervisors were promoted from the agent ranks. Seeing people get promoted from being a frontline agent is very exciting.

But what’s frightening is that 99% of supervisors do not receive any competency-based skill development in their new role. Can you say, “turnover problem?”

We all know that the skills needed to be a frontline contact center supervisor is dramatically different than being a contact center agent.

So just throwing the ones capable of being supervisors into the role and not developing their skills is a major contributor to more than 50% of newly promoted supervisors failing. And the ones that make it have a very long learning curve. It’s a sink or swim scenario.

Supervisors Sink or Swim

What happens in this sink or swim situation (this is the frightening contact center industry common practice) is that these failing supervisors cause significant levels of employee and customer dissatisfaction and turnover. That’s right, employees leave and customers leave because of the lack of frontline supervisor development quality.

Sink or swim happened to me. And as I go around to different contact center industry events, I talk with many current and former supervisors, we share the same sink or swim experience.

Adriana Thompson, Contact Center Supervisor of the Year 2018, also shared a similar experience. During her journey to high-performance. She had to create her own path, and she was able to swim.

The sink or swim thing is what’s always been done in contact centers. This obviously is a major contributor to our chronic agent and supervisor turnover problem. But why would you want to continue the common practice that should have been eliminated long ago?

It’s Preventable – Build a Dream Team

This supervisor development quality issue is totally preventable. Instead of sink or swim, we must give supervisors a learning journey framework and pathway to success.

For organizations that have been able to leverage this approach they are seeing big returns. And the research shows (Source: DDI) when organizations develop their frontline leaders adhering to the success path and learning journey framework, development quality increases by more than 90% versus just 9%. This is how a Dream Team gets built.

Low development quality efforts may consist of a simple class, book, or web seminar, along with a performance review process. The journey framework and success path are higher quality and more sustainable because they extend beyond development as an event and they incorporate more experiential and hand-on learning opportunities.

To capture a 90% improvement and greater performance quality in supervisor skill development it requires a continuous, experiential, and holistic competency-based skill development approach and the use of tools such as virtual classrooms, micro-learning, videos, blogs, boot camps, podcasts, coaching, and professional communities of practice.

Having a plan and pathway to skill development versus just receiving a book, or attending a class should be the common practice. Let’s face it, supervisor success is crucial to your success.

Six Core Competencies

After 30 years of research into the highest performing contact center supervisors and obtaining the guidance and wisdom of industry leaders with over 200 years of combined contact center leadership experience – which includes lifetime achievement award honorees – we were able to determine six core competencies that needed to be developed and grown for people to be high-performing supervisors.

To be a Dream Team member, the competencies are:

• Staff Development – Staff development refers to the process where employees are offered training and education, provided by an employer, to improve and enhance personal knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are advantageous to their role in the organization.
• Customer Service and Sales – Customer service involves meeting and surpassing expectations of customers and showing how important they are to you and the business. By understanding the needs of the customers and how your products and services benefit them, it leaves a lasting impression to maintain their loyalty.
• Results Orientation – Results orientation is setting goals for metrics and standards, and conveys a sense of urgency, removes obstacles and challenges, and focuses on accomplishing goals through and with others, for optimum outcomes.
• Collaborative Relationships – Building collaborative relationships is making a commitment to understand yourself as you work with multiple individuals while respecting and developing others in a joint effort to productively accomplish a task or project.
• Communication and Change Management – Communication and change management is building trust with individuals and teams, using the power of speaking, listening, and presentations, while creating an atmosphere in which timely information. When an organization is in transition, it is knowing what strategies help individuals understand their purpose amidst changes while helping them adapt.
• Business Acumen – Business acumen views the contact center with an executive mentality by understanding the moving parts of a company, using both quantitative and qualitative bottom line financial focus, and assessing how well the moving parts are working together.

These six core competencies need to be taught, practiced, coached, and tested. Merely teaching them in a classroom does not transfer to job performance. All learning professionals are acutely aware of the learning transfer gap.

This is why the success path and learning journey are so vital. It’s a continuous effort to build skills.

Driving Development Quality

To build your Supervisor Dream Team and capture 90% or greater of high-level quality skill development, look to create a framework for this ongoing journey with multiple methods and levels of learning.

• Training – Training on the six core competencies. Validate knowledge and understanding and break learning into phases of mastery.
• Micro-learning – On-demand or just-in-time courses that reinforce and provide greater insight into the six core competencies.
• Quick Tips – On-demand or just-in-time access to information that targets key learning opportunities and real-world scenarios faced by supervisors.
• Questions & Answers – Provide a way for supervisors to quickly get answers to questions about issues. This is not a company help desk about technical issues, but a frontline leadership resource.
• Boot Camps – Also known as challenge courses, these give supervisors a way to learn and practice new success behaviors in short periods of time.
• Industry Insights – Supervisors are pressed to be more innovative and creative. For this to occur, they need exposure to the outside of the organization.
• Communities of Practice – Organizations that leverage a community of practice for peers in specific skilled jobs report a massive acceleration in skill development.

Constructing a Supervisor Success Path focusing on the six core competencies using various learning methods in a framework is how you build a supervisor Dream Team that actually prevents problems from happening. This is how you get a coordinated team that engages employees and customers and squashes turnover problems.

Take the First Step: Assess Your Supervisors

While supervisors may look wonderful on your reports or may “feel” like a good supervisor – objectively evaluating your contact center supervisor management team is an essential part of their skill development. In order to do so, you must first disassociate yourself personally in order to measure supervisors based on a set standard of skill performance.

To assist you in this endeavor and to see where your team of supervisors’ strengths and opportunities are with the six core competencies you need to them. Your evaluation needs to provide a to-do list while helping you compare and understand your contact center supervisor’s individual skills and performance.

Building a Supervisor Dream Team, even if you never been a supervisor, can be done. Just like building supervisor skills — you need a good framework and a success path that leads to success.

Jim Rembach of Call Center Coach is a former frontline call center supervisor that has spent more than twenty years as a strategic and tactical advisor who specializes in using analytics. Jim has authored nine books regarding contact center quality, employee engagement, customer experience and leadership development. He may be reached at jim@callcentercoach.com. For more information about Call Center coach, please visit www.callcentercoach.com.