#3 Essential Ingredient for Supervisor Success
Engagement Training
This the third of four posts in a series on the 4 Essential Ingredients for Supervisor Success when it comes to creating and maintaining high levels of employee engagement in contact centers or call centers. (See the 2 previous posts for Essential Ingredients #1: Accountability and #2 Time)
Assuming your contact center has re-aligned supervisors' priorities to allow them to spend 50%+ of their time out on the floor coaching and that they are accountable for the appropriate metrics, the next component every supervisor needs is the right training.
Usually supervisors are experienced service reps promoted from within the service center. Most receive training in the technical and systems side of managing a service operation, but rarely receive in-depth training in coaching and mentoring - two of the basic skillset supervisors need to build and maintain agent commitment and engagement.
Want to improve agent engagement? 3 Crucial Skills Supervisors need to learn
Supervisors master the art of treating each agent as an individual; someone who brings to the job a unique combination of experience, skills and abilities. Supervisors dust off their active listening skills, learn how to encourage engagement through dialogue, and how to leverage their knowledge of behavior styles to tailor their approach to fit each agent.
Learning these skills often requires a paradigm shift. Instead of the supervisor starting their one-to-one coaching sessions with their assessment of the call, they learn how to flip the conversation. This coaching model teaches the supervisor how to involve agents in critiquing their calls. Agents are asked to identify 2 things they did particularly well (and will continue to do) and one thing they would do differently if they had a chance to do the call again. Supervisors learn 4 coaching protocols that build agent autonomy and mastery.
Agents who are fully engaged are happy to use their discretionary effort to create the best possible customer experience. Supervisors learn how to shift out of managing performance by the numbers and firefighting to mentoring their agents in a way that makes them feel valued and important.
Most supervisors I know are eager to trade their role as performance-enforcer for talent-developer but lack the know-how and/or a specific process they can follow. For some supervisors building front-line engagement isn't a training issue. These leaders know what to do - all they need is permission to do what comes naturally.