Everyone has a story of a bad boss. Maybe they were micromanagers or didn’t trust you to do your work. Perhaps they set impossible standards and goals and didn’t take the time to coach you properly. Bad management causes stress. You end up hating your job, and, in some cases, it can push you to quit.

According to Gallup, one in two employees have left a job to get away from a manager at some point in their career. And in an outbound call center, you can’t afford to lose employees. Call center turnover remains high, hovering between 30% and 45% every year. That level of turnover means reduced productivity and more time spent recruiting, training, and onboarding new employees. All of that is costly.

But just as bad managers drive away employees, good managers encourage retention and engagement. Outbound call centers need managers who can oversee their agents while providing consistent training and coaching to help them learn, grow, and provide better service.

Use this three-part framework to improve your management skills and cultivate more effective and engaged outbound call center agents.

Part 1: Skills Development and Training for Outbound Call Center Agents

Your agents need someone who can teach them the skills to do their jobs well. Both soft and hard skills are essential for agents to connect with customers and guide them to solutions. Targeted skills development training can have a considerable impact. Here are a few ways to boost agent skills in your outbound call center.

Use Skills Assessments

No one likes a training session full of redundancies and non-applicable information. Before crafting your training program, identify what your agents already know and where their weak spots are using skills assessments. Use these tests to determine their proficiency in essential areas such as communication, product knowledge, objection handling, and closing techniques.

You can also create self-assessment opportunities. We know the areas we struggle in. For that reason, self-assessment is a powerful way for agents to identify their strengths and weaknesses and gain insight into their perceived skill levels.

Tailor Your Training Programs

With your assessments, locate the most notable gaps in your outbound call center and build training that targets those weaknesses. Host product knowledge sessions by bringing in experienced agents or product experts to provide in-depth training on specific products or services. With a deep dive into the product, agents can confidently address customer questions.

Hold specific training sessions for closing techniques. This will help agents learn how to convert leads into sales. Then, take a note from The Office and host role-playing exercises for your outbound call center agents (okay, maybe not exactly like Jim and Dwight’s). This can help agents learn how to navigate real conversations and practice skills in a safe environment.

Create Spaces for Continuous Learning

Learning should be an ongoing process. To support continuous development, provide regular refresher training. Give your agents access to high-quality and updated learning resources. Create an archive or webinars on various topics, share knowledge base articles, or send online courses to help them grow.

To support camaraderie and learning, create a mentorship program that pairs less experienced agents with seasoned ones. These partnerships build relationships and support professional development across your team.

Check out this blog post on call center performance management.

Part 2: Performance Monitoring and Feedback

Giving and receiving feedback is a crucial piece of performance improvement in every area of life. We get grades in school, we review movies and restaurants, and we get scored on our athletic performance. So, monitoring and feedback shouldn’t stop in the workplace.

In fact, regular and focused feedback is essential for employee development and engagement. As the manager, it gives you a starting point for coaching and conversation. It provides agents with clear guidelines so they know what to aim for and how to improve. It also gives them goals, which enhances motivation.

In your outbound call center, you should take the time to track agent performance. Then, provide each agent with constructive feedback in reviews. Let’s dig into some specifics.

Track Performance and Give Quality Feedback

Implement real-time performance tracking systems to monitor KPIs in your outbound call center, like average hold time, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. This data offers a benchmark so you know how well your team is performing. And it also helps identify key areas for growth.

Let’s say your agent, Michael, has a high average handle time but struggles with converting calls into sales. While data alone might not give you the whole picture, that information is a jumping-off point for broader training. Now, you can focus on helping Michael with conversions so he feels more confident turning a conversation into a resolution.

Here are some things to keep in mind when providing feedback.

• Be specific. Provide concrete examples of strengths and areas of improvement.
• Focus on behavior. Address actions rather than personality traits to keep feedback constructive and actionable.
• Offer solutions. Don’t focus on deficiencies; give resources to help agents improve.
• Encourage dialogue. Help agents feel comfortable discussing their challenges with you.

Part 3: Agent Empowerment and Engagement

We hinted at this earlier, but turnover is a serious problem in outbound call centers — and it directly impacts your bottom line. Filling an empty seat can cost anywhere from $10,000 – $20,000 per agent. And that doesn’t even factor in the cost of training, the lost productivity as new agents are onboarded, or the hit to morale.

Let’s put this into context. In a call center with 100 agents and an industry-standard 45% attrition rate, you could spend as much as $1.6 – $4.8 million every year on turnover!

It isn’t worth it. The best way to combat turnover is by investing in employee engagement and empowering agents to perform at their best. Here are a few practices to help improve engagement.

Provide Agents with Tools and Resources

Empower your outbound call center agents with the tools and resources to succeed. Tools like CRM systems can streamline processes and help agents track interactions so they have the customer information they need.

You can also create call scripts and templates to guide agents through conversations so they always know what to say. Invest in automation tools that reduce repetitive and tedious tasks and provide robust knowledge bases. This gives agents a place to refer to product information and troubleshooting guides during calls.

Create a Culture of Recognition and Camaraderie

The workplace should be a community where employees can make friends, feel known, and be recognized for their hard work. To keep top performers, make your call center a place people want to work. Encourage camaraderie by creating space for time together through weekly happy hours or catch-up sessions. You can also add team-building activities and cross-training to encourage agents to communicate with each other.

Then, create a culture of appreciation by recognizing and rewarding accomplishments. Celebrate wins through public shout-outs in team meetings or over your Slack channels. Use KPIs to identify top performers and offer rewards, like a gift card or an extra day of PTO. Treat your agents as humans and offer them the flexibility and room to grow, laugh, and enjoy time together. I promise it will pay off.

Looking for an outbound call center solution that can help you manage your agents? Schedule a demo to learn more about our virtual call center.