Managing a small call center brings big challenges – and big opportunities. While it’s true that all call centers -- regardless of size, industry, function or location – share several core commonalities, small call centers (50 or fewer FTEs) often must contend with unique issues and obstacles that rarely if ever impact larger centers.  

For instance, whenever one or two agents in a large call center don’t show up to work or don’t come back from their lunch or break on time, the effect on customer accessibility and satisfaction (and the center’s costs) is often negligible. The same scenario, however, in a center with a frontline of just 25-30 agents can prove positively devastating.

And that’s just one obvious example of the challenges and issues that small call centers face. There are numerous others, which we will touch upon in this article. Now, I am by no means suggesting that small centers are impossible to manage effectively. Truth is, countless managers of small centers have achieved great success and transformed their diminutive operations into  powerful, influential entities that are highly respected within the larger enterprise.

All it takes is a solid grasp of the essentials of call center management, and an ample amount of creativity and insight. Following are 10 key tactics and approaches that will help you achieve very big things in your small call center.

Getting Big Results in a Small Call Center

Don’t skimp on the people  -- leaders are the key.

This sounds obvious and it is.  A common mistake made in small call centers is not investing in the growth of the leaders.  Call centers in general do a significant amount of internal promotion – moving frontline reps into supervisor or management positions.    Larger call centers typically have the luxury of formal development or mentoring programs to grow new supervisors.   Smaller call centers often find themselves at the lower end of the maturity model -- few people in the organization with a formal understanding of the foundational requirements of call center leadership.   This knowledge gap makes it harder for new and upcoming leaders to gain a full appreciation of what it takes to effectively navigate the call center waters.  

You would never expect a fireman to be able to do their job without spending a significant amount of time training, learning and practicing.   While call centers don’t put leaders in life and death situations, several managers say they spend a significant amount of time putting out fires.   Every small call center should develop a formal on-boarding program for new leaders -- a plan that outlines the training programs, policies and evaluation criteria.   By documenting the expected activities and holding monthly progress meetings, your new leaders will be engaged in the activity that makes every person (and organization) better – continuous improvement.   And, once you’ve done it just a few times, you’ll create the internal mentors with the expertise to transfer the right knowledge to your upcoming leaders.

Create flexibility with your schedules and your organization.

Schedules in small call centers are typically defined by the open and close time of the environment supported.   If the rest of the company works 9 am to 5 pm, then it only makes sense to have the call center work the same hours.    Keeping standard hours can be a source of frustration and challenge in a small call center.  Everything about running a call center of any size comes down to managing the interval (e.g., every half hour).   If everyone comes in at the same time, the obvious challenge is breaks and lunches – this is even more compounded in smaller call centers.   An easy fix is to stagger start times and provide the call center more off-phone type work to keep them occupied during the earlier and later times when the phones aren’t on.   This approach helps with coverage, but there is an even bigger benefit – happier employees.  Because the call center typically isn’t  the most desirable job in the company, you can use schedule flexibility to help boost the morale of agents in the center and allow them to do something no one else can.

Creating flexibility in schedules also helps small call centers reduce turnover by allowing call center agents to do things not available to other parts of the organization.   Once you’ve got the interval challenge completely understood (no small task), you can become creative with schedules – allow agents to work consolidated shifts, split shifts, shared shifts – anything is possible as long as the interval requirements are covered.   Allowing agents to learn other skills between calls is another advantage in a small call center – time between calls is almost non-existent in large call centers, but a requirement in small centers.   Use this time to help the frontline learn the skills they need for their next job outside of the call center.  This helps to encourage realistic conversations about the agent’s future desires.  

Consider size in establishing agent measures

Smaller call centers have to overcome the productivity challenge; we really want to keep people busy, but the math in running a small call center doesn’t allow for agents  to occupy the same amount of time as those in larger ones.  In addition, growth and time of day both have to be considered when setting any type of performance objectives.    Conventional wisdom in most call centers is to focus on the things within the agent’s control – e.g., schedule adherence and quality.   This is also true in small call centers, but is often a challenge of because technology and resource limitations.   While lack of technology can be overcome to some degree with spreadsheets and desktop recorders, the fact that small call centers typically have to be more flexible makes line- in- the-sand agent measures more challenging.

In most cases, small call center agents are required to wear several hats that move them outside of the normal inbound measured activities.  For example, a lack of internal transfer options will lead to more outbound follow-up calls to complete transactions that require additional coordination.  And, don’t forget about the time that has to be taken to actually get to the resolution.  

There are several other activities that tend to make small call center agents behave differently – fax/printer duties, manual paperwork for internal communication, last-minute break changes to handle the queues, managing back-line/voicemail, etc.    With fewer resources to manage the customer service processes, smaller call centers have to get creative -- resulting in some slight changes to typical agent expectations.  

An important stating point is really understanding what the expectations should be and dividing them between ACD and non-ACD activities.   ACD activities are easy to measure and typically are automated – you can get reports on just about everything an agent does from the time they log in to the time they log out.    The non-ACD activities are harder to track and often ignored in favor of the things you can get out of the phone system with just a click of the mouse.   Understanding the real expectations of  agents allows you to use the ACD reports but find a way to balance them with all of the other non-phone activities required.    Too often, small call center leaders set ACD goals with the best intentions that end up forcing agents to behave in ways that are actually counterproductive to providing great service.    

Understand what growth really means to your environment

As the company grows, so does the call center – in fact, once the value of the center is realized, more activities get centralized and the call center begins to grow faster than the other parts of the organization.    Small call centers typically have a very tight workplace community – everyone knows each other’s strengths and habits.   Change is easy to make when call centers are small and just about everyone can be included.   The smallness allows the environment to be managed without a lot of documentation or policies -- things just seem to work because everyone knows what’s happening.

Leaders of small call centers must avoid becoming a victim of compliancy and believing they can cut corners because everything is running fine without all the “formalities”.     Without formal processes and documentation, growth becomes difficult, change is harder for everyone and the clean-up effort is painful.    A simple way to get started is to approach things from a new center perspective.  Ask yourself, if you were going to duplicate your activities in another city, what would  the new center need to know to be successful?  Create teams to document your standard work processes, agent expectations and scheduling rules.   Just getting them down on paper is eye-opening for small call centers, as it allows them to begin to rethink the way things have always been done.  

Start with understanding the drivers – what are the things that cause customers to call, and how has that been trending?  The drivers are the very high level company activities (sales, shipments, customers, etc.) that will increase or decrease over time.   Getting to the root cause of the call (the driver) will allow you to begin to create new opportunities to improve efficiency and is a great way to show the center’s value to others in the organization.   For example, if you’re able to reduce the driver to call ratio from 50 percent to 40 percent through better training, first-call resolution, and leadership, you can easily correlate this to an improvement in satisfaction and support cost savings.   Documentation of the ongoing improvements in your processes helps get the attention of everyone in the organization and makes support for new initiatives much easier to obtain.

Develop your internal improvement agents

Large companies typically have teams of people that are continually looking for new ways to become more productive and effective.   A continuous improvement approach can save large companies millions every year while improving the quality of work/life for the frontline agents.     The annual budget of many small call centers is less than a million dollars, so the improvement attention and resources are typically disbursed to the other areas of the organization that have the most potential bottom line impact.    This leaves the leaders of small call centers trying to balance the day to day running of the business with the challenge of improving the operational efficiencies – and, normally keeping the business running takes priority.

A way to help get more “eyes” on the improvement opportunities is to help frontline agents view their job differently.    Provide them training that focuses on life from the customer’s perspective and how small internal changes can make the overall experience better.  Help them connect the dots between happy customers, improved efficiencies, profitable growth and ultimately more opportunities for call center job opportunities.    Soon you’ll have an internal team of customer advocates looking for new ways to learn from each interaction.      If every agent sees every contact as an opportunity to grow the business, they’ll be more passionate about their job and more aware of their role as an ambassador of improvement.   

Creating this mindset change must come from the top, and starts with a continuous feedback and recognition loop that is focused on frontline generated improvements.   Allowing the frontline to create, participate in and actually run a frontline driven program requires a commitment of time, and if done right, will provide a return on investment in several forms: happier customers, improved employee satisfaction and reduced cost.  An easy way to get started is to ask the frontline to identify a “top-three” list – what three things are we doing internally that are causing customers to call?   Keep it simple and focused on the opportunity – changing the way something is done or communicated.  By allowing the front line to meet and discuss these opportunities, you quickly have a laundry list of “avoidable” call activities.  And, you’ll find that many of them are easy fixes with immediate return.  

Be careful to not go overboard with WFM and quality

The majority of workforce management (WFM) and quality “how to” books and papers are written from a large call center point of view.    The reason for this is simple: larger call centers typically have the budget and challenges that make automated WFM and quality monitoring tools a requirement.    These tools help larger call centers ensure they have the appropriate number of people available and that they’re saying and doing things that are consistent with the organizations policies and customers’ expectations.   Larger call centers often have dedicated teams to manage both programs and some even have sub-teams under each, creating a more granular focus on what’s scheduled and said.   These processes allow larger call centers to continually redefine the way work is routed and how agents are trained, leading to more specialization and efficiencies.

Small call centers typically don’t have the luxury of segmenting callers to specific agents in ways that make them more efficient.   As a result, all calls eventually end up being handled by the same pool of agents – any specialization efficiency gets lost in the generalist overflow.    When agents are required to wear many hats, there has to be more flexibility in the expectations – a quality program that is too focused on scripts and exactness can quickly lead to frustration and conflict.    With a smaller agent pool, the scheduling process must be flexible enough to overcome last minute changes or unexpected call fluctuations.   A WFM process focused on always having the exact number of bodies in chairs can quickly backfire in small call centers, creating environments of continuous push and pull.    With less workload predictability and fewer frontline agents required to handle more transactions, smaller call centers must be more flexible in how they approach the documented best practices in quality and WFM.    Both are a key enabler to success in call centers of all sizes, but leaders of small centers need to spend extra time outlining the potential pitfalls of becoming too inflexible.

Quality programs should be focused more on improving the environment than on managing  agents.  In smaller call centers, it’s easy to know who isn’t providing quality – in some cases everyone can hear it, and in others, agents find themselves cleaning up after the same people.   When the opportunities surface, a quality score isn’t going to change the behavior; more attention and feedback will help identify the root cause.   The real opportunity is to take the quality program and evaluate every call from the customer’s perspective and ask yourself what could we (the company) do better next time.   The same is true on the WFM side – adherence to schedule  as a score isn’t effective if it doesn’t reflect the reality of the environment.   Because agents in small call centers are often pulled to do a lot of other things during the day, the adherence score isn’t as important as spending time helping agents understand what the appropriate behaviors should be and allowing agents to apply more ownership to their daily activities.  

Accomplishing this starts with creating an awareness of the difference between the real-time customer service requirements of a call center and delayed queuing environments.   Call centers require a more immediate response, and there is a science to making these responses happen within seconds at every interval of the day.   Everyone plays a role in the success, and small call center leaders have to spend time explaining the impact of a single agent and how all the pieces fit together.   Small call center leaders should first become students of call centers by learning the foundational skills very well.  Then, they must evolve into teachers – helping everyone in the organization remain focused on the value of every contact with every caller.

Non-addressed issues are more visible to all

Everyone gets to know each other in small call centers – this can be both good and bad.   On one hand, it helps to make it feel more like a team and agents are able to pitch in and help everyone improve.   On the other hand, everyone is able to see who isn’t pulling their weight and not trying to improve for the good of the team.    When you have a group of people all sitting in the same room and talking to each other every day, they’ll eventually run out of personal stories to tell and focus more attention on the activities of the “other” team members.     These conversations quickly evolve from the activity itself to the leadership’s ignorance of the issue and lack of responsiveness.   Once teams start to blame the leadership, everything becomes “their” fault and is the reason nothing gets improved.   

With small call centers becoming like a family, it’s easy for leaders to get caught up in a new kind of parent trap – being too close to the people to see and address the real problems.   Small call center leaders need to develop a formal coaching regiment that ensures every front line agent is receiving improvement feedback at least once a week. With small groups and teams, there is a tendency to eyeball the results vs. spending the time to document results in a scorecard format that ensures all opportunities are addressed and visible.  

It takes more than just on-the-job training

A formal training program is a luxury for most small call centers, and because of the low turnover, most new hire training is done one-on-one.  Many small call centers find an additional agent on the phone is more valuable than a full time training resource that can’t be fully occupied because the people that need to be trained will have to be on the phone most of the time.    It’s very difficult to find an hour for a team meeting, much less a week off the phone for a formal class.  This approach leads to a lack of documentation of the standard operation procedures or even an update of the internal knowledge base.  Over time, several ways of doing things will evolve and the internal best practice will be based on who influenced the new person the most.  

Training starts with something that was described earlier – standard processes in place and documented.   The lack of a formal training department or dedicated trainer is not an excuse for not having a clearly defined “on-boarding” program.   These programs can be a combination of one-on-one meetings, private computer-based role plays, agent monitoring and individual testing.   All of these can be easily created from the formal process and documented against an expected time line.     And, the rest of the organization can be an incredible training resource for new front line telephone agents.   A program focused on allowing new agents to spend time with the other departments “walking in their shoes” will reduce the learning curve time and improve their overall confidence when addressing customers.    And, it’s a great way to continually connect with other areas of the organization and facilities an environment of on-going improvement.

Create a road map for senior management

One thing small call centers don’t have is a way to overcome the mathematical inefficiency that requires  a significant portion of the  center’s agents  be “sitting around”.   While we can do things to help fill some of the gaps with other types of work, there is nothing we can do to make everyone take a call when senior management ventures through the center.    Senior management is often left with an unsettling feeling that money is being wasted because “half” of the people aren’t on the phone.   Overcoming this mindset starts with educating yourself in queuing theory and using this knowledge to create a simple example of the “why” for senior management.   Spending a couple hours creating some what-if scenarios in an Erlang calculator  will provide you with several new ways to engage executives in appreciating the real complexity of running a small call center.  

Numbers alone won’t get you all of the support you need to move your small call center forward.   Spend some time creating an understating and appreciation for the role you play in the organization’s success.  In every business there is a critical path to profit or fulfillment - -  simply put, the most efficient way for the organization to reach its goal.  For example, for an on-line retailer, the most profitable path would be the customer placing the order on-line, paying online, receiving the exact product when promised and being happy with it.    Any deviation from this path costs the company more money in support as the customer falls off the most efficient way for them to make money.  In this case, every call to the call center costs the organization profit margin.  This is true, but if every one of those calls is viewed as a way to help improve the path for future customers, it’s not all money wasted.  Being able to connect the value of every interaction with the organization’s critical path is key to getting additional support and investments.

Technology is becoming easier to obtain, but still never an excuse

Call center technologies are continually evolving and larger call centers are normally the initial beneficiaries of the latest features.   Customer’s expectations also continually evolve as the larger call centers implement the new tools to improve service or internal efficiencies.   This puts smaller centers at somewhat of a disadvantage because the newer technologies are typically priced out of reach, and the center’s limits how much advantage it can ultimately receive.    The good news for small call centers is that a lot of technology companies are paying attention to the largest segment of the market – centers employing fewer than 50 agents – and developing tools that fit these centers’ unique needs.   And, there is resurgence in the hosted solution approach  that allows you to pay as you grow. 

In centers of any size, the technology won’t change anything by itself; you’ve got to create the foundation for success, streamline the processes and have the right people doing the right things.  If done right, technology will make you more efficient, but if done wrong, it can become the crutch and is the scapegoat for everything.

 An advantage in small call centers is being able to create a community of help where agents continually share ideas and tips with others.  Your knowledge base and improvement can come from the interactions and learning that agents have on a daily basis.  Spend time with agents to get a better feel for their special skills and desires – you might just have someone that can create an internal Web-based knowledge tool that everyone can update and share.   Once you begin the path of internal automation, the ROI for external tools becomes much easier to explain and achieve.

Pulling it All Together

Leaders of small call centers must not only master the fundamentals of running call centers, but must also develop creative ways to do those things just a little differently.    There is never a single-size solution – even small call centers can’t do everything exactly the same.  As described above, small call center leaders must spend the time to develop organizations that don’t see themselves limited by size.   If done right, the opposite will evolve – an organization that is only limited by their service imagination.