Are You a Good Call Center Leader? It's Time for a Credit Check

Call center leaders cannot escape complaints about the staffing crunch. They hear that the current generation doesn’t want to work in their call centers. They see high rates of turnover and see that agents are not developing a long-term engagement with the company and its products, creating a scenario in which the product familiarity needed to truly serve customers never gets properly developed.

They don’t, however, always do what it takes to meaningfully resolve the problem—they don’t recognize that their own successes and failures as a leader can greatly influence the engagement, productivity and longevity of their customer support team. While some generational problems might be inherent and unavoidable, not everything is out of the leader’s control.

It is this mindset that drives Julie Silbar, Vice President of Hospitality Systems at Red Lion Hotels and a featured speaker at the International Contact Center Summit, to buy into the "leadership credit rating" concept, which came to her attention in "The Leadership Challenge."

Silbar believes acceptance of the credit rating concept forces leaders to hold themselves accountable, thereby creating a lead by example/lead as you want to be led culture within the call center.

"What [the credit rating] means is, every time you make a decision or you do something as a leader…your employees and your coworkers kind of do a mental credit check," explains Silbar in this exclusive CustomerManagementIQ.com podcast. "If you have an employee who says can you take care of this for me…mentally, as soon as you say yes or no, they’re doing a mental credit check on you."

They, according to Silbar, are reviewing your "credit" as a leader to forecast if, when and how the proposed task will get done or the proposed question will get answered.

Silbar believes improved credit ratings can be successfully linked to improved productivity, employee engagement and employee motivation. They also spur a tendency to lead rather than manage, which Silbar sees as a cornerstone of a properly-functioning call center: "With a true leadership, you should be serving and guiding your staff. Managers are just telling people what to do. There’s no democracy involved."

The transformation of the leadership culture will bring long-lasting benefits. As call centers become increasingly global and multi-channel, "You have to make sure you are leading your staff by empowering them to make decisions based on who they are interacting with."

A clear route to staff empowerment, the leadership credit rating and its subsequent impact on leadership culture keeps the call center harmonious and ready to tackle customer challenges as they continue to evolve.

Learn more about Julie Silbar’s leadership philosophy, best practices and proven results in this CustomerManagementIQ.com podcast. And if you want to see how she does it in more detail (and pick her brain for how you can become a better leader in your organization), check out the International Contact Center Summit. Details:

[inlinead]