A contact center agent deals with stress on a daily basis, and it can get pretty taxing. But a contact center manager is no exception. The stakes have always been high and the pressure is on for the upper management.

Imagine having to balance operational costs, customer experience, agent retention, and revenue growth–Contact center managers need to be on top of all of these things 100 percent of the time.

Here are three strategies to help in your journey to contact center management success.

Set goals and create a game plan

Just winging it in the contact center arena almost always leads to failure. Contact centers deal with huge contracts and losing one might either put the organization in a bind or lead to the entire organization’s dissolution.

Create a list of challenges you’ve faced in the past quarter of the year and another list of the contact center’s accomplishments. This aids in determining where most issues occur. You can then prioritize them according to urgency. An example, agent attrition. As reported by Forrester, some call centers have an attrition rate of 50-100 percent year. Considering the cost of starting and running a contact center, a high turnover rate is a serious threat to a contact center’s capacity to continuously operate.

Once you’ve figured out your what’s, it’s time to brainstorm your why’s and how’s. This enables you to build a solid roadmap toward eliminating the causes and improving processes that have contributed to the problem.

To pull this off, a contact center manager needs to be analytical while having the ability to come up with out-of-the-box solutions. Also, the different stages of planning and implementation require teamwork. Being open to employee feedback and having the ability to delegate tasks to all the right people helps with the goal-setting process.

Hire the most suitable employees

A company’s backbone is its people. The recruitment and hiring process is a crucial part of an organization’s ability to consistently perform within or beyond what’s required.

Based on TLNT.com’s study, replacing entry-level employee costs between 30-50 percent of their annual salary.

A contact center agent has an average yearly income of $25,000 to $30,000. Once an agent leaves because of a poor job fit, the company will need to hire a replacement. It’ll cost the company roughly $10,500 for the ex-employees separation pay, as well as recruitment, onboarding, and training fees for the new candidate.

To begin getting applications from the right candidates, ensure that the job description is transparent and thorough. Never leave out gray areas including the salary and benefits. It’s also essential to include a brief overview of your organization’s goals and purpose.

As per Business News Daily, it’s important to focus on what you offer to would-be employees. This attracts candidates that best fit your work culture and address your needs.

The interview process also plays a huge role in making sure you have future employees best-suited for the job. The trick is to not only concentrate on the candidate’s technical abilities, experience, and skill set; it’s essential to determine his emotional intelligence, personality, willingness, and coachability. A mix of situational and behavioral questions help weed out unfit applicants from candidates that are perfect for the role.

Supply a solid onboarding program

Never underestimate the power of an all-inclusive onboarding program. Sure you’ve discussed details about the company and the work environment during the recruitment and interview process, but it’s never a bad thing to reinforce the particulars.

The main goal of onboarding employees is to reduce the gap between “beginners” and the tenured agents. Urbanboard reveals that companies with a standardized onboarding process yield 54 percent higher new agent productivity and a 50 percent increase in their new-hire retention rate.

During the onboarding process, provide how-to-guides that discuss tool familiarity, and topics about your products and service at the focal point. This is also the perfect opportunity to fortify your new hires’ problem-solving skills to ensure a smooth transition to production.

To increase the potency of your organization’s onboarding program, make use of advanced learning tools such as interactive games, contests, role-playing, and call simulations. Different individuals learn in different ways, combine different learning styles as early as the onboarding process.

Immerse new hires and allow them to witness live customer interactions—calls, tickets, emails—via remote access or shadowing. This way, the learning experience becomes immersive while tenured agents don’t get distracted. Include examples of recorded calls along with chat and email transcripts to develop and enhance a new hire’s understanding of what quality customer experience looks like.

The onboarding program generally lasts 90 days from when an employee gets hired. According to Bersin By Deloitte, 22 percent of employee attrition occurs in the first 45 days of being employed.

To eliminate the feeling of inadequacy, equip “newbies” with the knowledge and skills before hitting the floor. More confident agents make better customer service decisions and less likely to churn. New employees who are part of a well-established onboarding program are 69 percent more likely to stay in a company for more than three years.

An effective contact center administration should never rush the onboarding process as this could also affect agent turnover or churn rates.

This post is an excerpt from an article that first appeared here and is reproduced with permission from Tenfold. For more, check out the full article here.