The Changing Role of the Contact Center Supervisor

April, 2021

Supervisors are slowly moving away from manual management of technology and adapting their skills to become Team Leaders, focusing on customer service and agent efficiency.

In every industry, the march of progress only travels in one direction: technology is developed to perform tasks previously done by people. In the process, efficiency is boosted, more can be achieved for less expense and people are reassigned to other tasks that technology cannot do (yet).

Consider arable farming pre 1850: when the harvest was ready, workers would come with scythes and manually cut the crops. When the combine harvester came along, the same job could be completed far more quickly and efficiently, and workers were freed from repetitive, intensive labour.

Similarly, the role of contact center supervisor has been changing.

The shift from manual management

Supervisors are slowly moving away from manual management of technology – monitoring call metrics, adjusting the outbound dialing rate, and moving agents around according to inbound demand to meet SLAs.

There are two key drivers forcing these changes:

  1. The job itself has become far more complex with the advance of the omnichannel contact center. Interactions must be managed across a variety of media channels, with varying inbound demand, trying to maintain the optimum balance between agent utilization and customer satisfaction. This balance has become too much for human brain to manage with any precision.
  2. Technology has progressed to be able to do the job automatically, far more efficiently and at far less cost.

 

A new focus

This moves the supervisor to a new role; that of mentor, team leader and coach, applying business policies and goals to front line operations. In fact, the title Team Leader is fast overtaking that of Supervisor.

Allowing the ACD to automatically manage the complexities of demand and supply means:

  1. The highest possible efficiency from agents, and the best possible service for customers.
  2. And it enables supervisors to provide more of the things only people can – empathy, motivation, teamwork, people management, customer rapport, the application of business goals to processes.

But here’s the rub: to unchain the supervisor, technology must be designed for optimum performance on its own, with no intervention. The Sytel AI Dialer™ has been doing this with predictive dialing for many years. And Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) now manages blending across not just voice but all digital channels as well, coping with the complexities of constantly changing demand across all these channels.

If your supervisors are still clinging to their scythes, then talk to us and we will show them a brave new world, where they can develop new skills and make your business much more productive.

What We Offer

Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.

Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.

All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.

Flexible Contact Center Software

Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale

  • Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

    CCaaS for subscribers – global service​, with no upfront costs

  • Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners

    Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software

  • Contact Center Platform – Enterprise

    High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid

Blended Media Desktop

Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace

Work Anywhere

Browser-based tools, no software installation required

Customise, Localise, White Label

Design all user interfaces to individual requirements

Integration via APIs

‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps

World Class Development

Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries

Capabilities

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.

All Media Channels

Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended

Agent Multi-Tasking

Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel

Dynamic Workforce Management

Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels

Predictive Dialing

Best-of-breed performance under compliance

Optimised Inbound Routing

Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service

Agent Scripts

Help agents achieve and maintain excellence

Voice and Screen Recording

See and hear exactly how agents are interacting

Analytics and Data Feeds

Measure and evaluate performance at every level

IVR, Bots & Conversational AI

Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers

Customer Journey Tracking

Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations

Modules

Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance

Softdial One™

Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators

Softdial Scripter™

Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications

Sytel AI Dialer™

Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules

Softdial Pathfinder™

Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection

Softdial Media Server™

Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls

Softdial Reporter™ 5

Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels

Softdial Publisher™

Comprehensive data output to build your own reports

Softdial Recording Monitor™

Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards

Softdial Campaign Manager™

Automation to optimise any outreach strategy

Softdial Repository™

Central storage and configuration of common resources

Sytel Global Compliance™

Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer

Solutions

Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications

By Business Type

Enterprise

A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale

Small/ Medium Business

Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves

By Industry

Customer Service

Connect quickly to well equipped agents

Market Research

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

Debt Collection

Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app

Sales & Telemarketing

Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing

Healthcare

Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care