The College of Call Center Excellence
Management Certification Curriculum

To begin, we focus on the importance of Leadership and sharing the mission and vision of the call center. We review all aspects of agent management from best practices in screening, on-boarding, training and ongoing management of our most important resource.
Next we discuss our favorite topic: What metrics do we need to successfully manage a call center? What tools should I use? What do we do with forecasts, adherence and schedules? How do we find the solutions that meet the needs of the business and the work-life balance of our agents while still being able to meet our service goals? Then, we concentrate on all of the day-to-day management issues. What are the high performing call centers doing to improve their quality assessment processes to drive customer satisfaction? In the Customer Satisfaction module, we discuss the multiple ways to measure, analyze and use the caller satisfaction finding.
Finally we discuss: “How do we measure and report our successes, progress and failures?” So how do we know if we are succeeding or failing? One part of the answer is to develop a benchmarking process. How do we decide which type of benchmarking is right for our organization?
Day 1:
Leadership and Organization
- Strategy Alignment
- Understanding the corporate business model
- Understanding the importance of customer recognition
- Strategic Goal Setting
- Strategy setting for the call center
- Where do we want to be five years from now
- Leadership Styles, Approaches and Assessment
- Leadership styles
- Leadership roles and approaches
- Assessing your leadership style
- Organization Design
- Organizational design criteria
- Understanding people, process and technology
Data Analytics
- Introduction to Analytic Tools
- What should companies measure
- What is the problem with numbers
- Best practices in analytics and reporting
- Designing Effective Reports
- Determine the report audience
- Determine the information needs
- Common report types
- Corporate Information Needs
- From data to knowledge
- Decision- maker’s needs
- Managing by the Numbers
- Why do managers measure?
- What should managers measure?
- From data to data analytics to action
- Call Center Performance Evaluation
- Metrics for success
- Metrics that need focusing on
- Metrics you need to know
- Your ultimate report card
- Now let’s talk about numbers
- New Analytic Tools
- In-Depth metric analysis
Human Resources
- Hiring New Agents
- Job description
- Finding applicants
- Screening applicants
- Testing applicant skills
- Interviewing applicants
- Realistic job preview
- Training Agents
- KPIs impacted by training
- Training evaluation
- Performance Evaluation
- Nesting training
- On-going training
- Computer- based training
- Training in small call centers
- Generations
Day 2:
Agent Satisfaction
- Agent Satisfaction Measurement
- Agent satisfaction introduction
- Agent satisfaction as related to agent turnover
- Processes that impact your center
- Agent feedback
- Processes influencing agent satisfaction
- Agent Turnover
- What’s “really important” to agents
- Top reasons for turnover
- Best practices in reducing agent turnover
- Exit interviews
- Agent Voices, a USA study
- Reward, Recognition, Motivation
- Instilling a performance culture
- Motivating the front line
- Best-in-class motivating techniques
- Reward and recognition
- Informal and formal programs that work
- Employee burnout
Customer Satisfaction
- Introduction
- Defining caller satisfaction
- Sorry, it is not about Satisfaction
- It is the journey
- Ripple effect
- Fastest way to lose customers
- Excellence is based on just one thing
- How should I measure customer satisfaction
- The three basics of successful companies
- Survey Structure
- Determining which customers to survey
- Determining which questions should be asked
- Determining the appropriate length of the survey
- Determining which attributes should be measured
- Determining sample size
- Survey Analysis
- Statistical routines
- Mining the caller feedback data
- Most Caller Satisfaction Programs Don’t Have an Impact
- Most stop after the fielding
- Reporting makes the difference
- Results must be actionable
Basic Workforce Management
- Resource Planning
- Forecasting fundamentals
- Advance forecasting
- Capacity planning fundamentals
- Advanced capacity planning
- Scheduling Defined
- Documenting staff special skills
- Scheduling shrinkage
- Scheduling options
- Intraday Management
- Intraday forecasting
- Crisis and absentee planning
- Intraday adjustment essentials
- Analytics and Metrics to Manage Optimizing
- From raw data to management information
- Data analytics
- Organization of the Workforce Management Team
- Workforce management organization
- Typical control tower organizational structure
- Workforce Management Software Tools
- Key workforce management metrics and goals
- Workforce management tools
Day 3
Quality and Call Monitoring
- Introduction to Call Monitoring and Coaching
- Introduction to call quality assurance
- Impact of call handling on company image
- Importance of superior service on customer-perceived value
- Hierarchy of caller needs
- Results from a one-minute survey
- Call Recording
- Recording alternatives
- When to record calls
- Which calls to record
- How long to save recorded calls
- Call Monitoring, Scoring and Evaluating
- Introduction to call monitoring
- Classic methods of call monitoring
- Evaluation process & forms
- Building the definitions document
- The evaluation form and scoring why the current methods are not optimal
- The components of call monitoring
Coaching For Performance
- Agent Coaching
- The art of agent coaching
- Who should coach agents
- How often do agents need to be coached
- What is the best way to coach agents
- Can the caller possibly coach the agent
- Call Handling
- Listening to the voice of the customer
- New principles
- IVR surveys
- Supervisor Reporting
- How can an agent self-manage
- Slowing down his/her delivery
- Asking for help regarding low FCR
- Listening to those calls that are indicating poor customer satisfaction
- Compensation
- Incentives
Self-Service
- Introduction to Caller Self-Service
- What is caller self-service?
- Business imperatives impacting self-service
- Caller self-service challenges
- Minimizing “opt-outs”
- Giving Callers Channel Alternatives
- How to migrate to other channel
- IVR Self-Service Technologies
- Evaluating scripts
- Key performance indicators
- Impact of Calls on Brand image
- Web Self-Service
- Why the move to the web
- Examples of effective web self service
Benchmarking
- Introduction to Benchmarking
- Benchmarking defined
- A snapshot of BenchmarkPortal (BMP)
- Benchmarking for profits
- Call Center Benchmark Metrics
- What metrics to compare
- Collecting performance metrics
- Performance Gap Analysis
- Driving gaps into improvement initiatives
- Determining broken process
- Investigating how each process is broken
- Implementing Improvement Initiatives
- Implementing improvement initiatives
- Re-benchmarking to assess improvement
- Benchmarking and the bottom line
- Call Center Certification
- Call Center Benchmarking Solution Providers
- Range of solutions providers