Manager Call Center

Key factors include a good understanding of the needs of the customer and having the right skills, resources and processes in place to meet these needs.

From a customer service management perspective criteria include clear communication of objectives and expectations to staff, consistent performance management, empowering staff to meet customer demands, ensuring staff are sufficiently engaged, listening to feedback from staff and customers and effectively acting on it.

What process did you follow to understand the reasons for the poor performance, gain commitment to the need for change and resolve the issues?

Approaches include developing a program of required actions for the team member to follow, providing training, coaching and mentoring, allocating necessary resources.

You must be able to work under pressure in a call centre. Explain that you thrive when working under pressure and that you are able to focus on a task well when there is a tight deadline.

Working in a call centre is essentially working on the front line of customer services. You have to be passionate about helping people and say that you respect the company’s values and products. You must, of course, research the company well beforehand because they will follow this up with a specific question about their products or values.

Make sure you do your homework/research before you answer: My average call handle time was about X minutes at my previous job. On a similar campaign I can typically make 60/X calls per hour. On a predictive dialer I can usually make 10 to 20 percent more calls.

This is a tricky question because “anything you say can and will be held against you!” Be careful and only answer with a positive tone. You can say that you didn’t find the job challenging enough for your skills, or that the workload was sporadic and you spent, say 40%, of your time on ‘idle’ mode. Never speak ill of your last employer because it shows that you will do exactly the same once you leave this one! Protect the image of your previous employer, and your current one will respect you for it.

Ideally the person you hire is someone who can grow in your organization. If you’re hiring an agent and their goal is to be involved in management in the next 5 years, it shows you that they’re motivated to grow and lead. This is a great way to hold on to talent!

As a leader charged with delivering excellent customer feedback, you will know how important it is that customer feedback and insight are monitored, measured and acted upon, whenever appropriate or necessary.

But how about your agents? This question is very much aligned to your engagement, coaching and development skills. You need to think about the culture, communication and interactions you have with your agents.

Discuss how you impart your knowledge and experience to your agents and how you ensure that they can continue to develop the confidence, skills, knowledge and habits that will drive excellent customer feedback with every interaction.

Your answer: Not every customer is in the right mood for a sales call, and I understand that. Irate customers are part of the game, and I can easily calm them down with an apology; however, I will usually attempt to get a callback time so a valuable potential customer doesn’t lose out on the great benefits your products can give them.

This is your opportunity to assure your potential employer that you are capable of working in line with your objectives and getting the job done on time.

In my current role, I break down my objectives into daily targets and outline periods of the day when I am going to focus on achieving them. I find this system works well for me and I expect to carry it into my next job.

Reveals candidate’s job expectations.

"I identified that we were not getting the feedback we needed from customers. To ensure we knew about all the experiences our customers have we had to create an easily accessible way for them to give us feedback.

One way we resolved this was with a phone survey at the end of a service call. By creating a means for customers to provide immediate feedback it was easier to learn what needed improvement."

The answer for this question depends on the role. It would be safest to answer that you can comfortably work on several accounts at the same time, but feel that when you can focus on one account you are able to provide a higher quality service.

Give an example of a time where you’ve gone out of your way to provide great customer service or help someone

The best answer is to say that goals and targets provide you with focus and that you enjoy the challenge of being the first in your team to reach the set goals. Also say that targets help to foster healthy competition within a team.

Your answer: As soon as I know that this is a DNC number, I will apologize at once to the customer for the error and assure them that their number will be immediately included in our internal DNC list. I will also make a note in the CRM application so even if the system error happens again the next agent won’t be forced to deal with an escalated problem. I will also report the problem to my team leader or manager as soon as I hang up.

This question is asked to determine whether or not you are going to bring something to the team.

In an ideal answer you will confirm that you are creative in your job role, and markedly so compared to some of your colleagues. You should then proceed to give examples which demonstrate this.

This question gives you the opportunity to tell the interviewer about how you developed a Monday-morning prize-giving incentive to get your team fired up for the week. Or how you introduced daily staff meetings to keep your team engaged with the goals of the organisation. Or implemented a buddy-up training programme to help your new recruits settle in faster.

This question helps your interviewer to gauge whether you understand your role in your current job, and how your efforts contribute to the goals of the organisation.

The company I currently work for publishes an annual report of KPIs relating to the goals they hope to achieve that year. I extract the company goals that are relevant to my department and break them down into weekly objectives. I then use these objectives to ensure that my team is constantly contributing to the overall goals of the organisation.

Surely they have a story to tell, presuming they came into this role with some customer service experience. It’s important to see what kind of story they choose to share. Ideally they’ll explain how they were ultimately the hero in an otherwise terrible customer interaction. That they went over and above to make the customer happy, and that their manager was thrilled with the outcome.