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It’s challenging to know how many agents you’re going to need answering calls on any given day when you work in a call center.

It’s that time of year again for your call center. You know it well. It’s the time when the number of incoming calls increases by 4X — it’s your busy season. You know the feelings surrounding your busiest season: supervisors are overworked from being pulled in a thousand directions, experienced agents are overwhelmed from covering complex calls, and new hires/seasonal workers are nervous (sometimes even making themselves physically ill from fear of answering calls).

Have you noticed that your virtual trainings haven't gone quite as well as your classroom trainings did? Reps quit out of the blue after the first week. No one's interacting (except for that ONE who always chimes in before anybody else can contribute). And when reps get on the call with an actual caller, they're either getting physically ill or going completely blank — like they haven't just spent 6 weeks in training?

Call centers deal with a lot of change! Especially in the year 2020. Everyone has had to think about redundancy, business continuity plans, staffing, work from home, and a whole host of other issues.

Don't worry. Wishing that your reps and co-workers would look at your written procedures and guides (and stop bothering you with questions) doesn't make you a bad person. There's only so much time in the day! But wishing won't get you anywhere. So let's look at why your employees and agents aren't using your resources.

Tell me if this sounds familiar... You were hired/promoted to be a call center supervisor or manager and handed a bunch of spreadsheets or PDFs with your protocols and procedures on them. You didn't create them, but you're now responsible for keeping them up to date. Or maybe you're in this boat... You were hired/promoted to be a call center supervisor or manager and had NOTHING to work with. Nobody had documented anything before you got there. So you opened up Visio, Word, or Excel and started documenting processes and procedures hoping that you could use them to train your reps.

There are a lot of metrics to track at a call center. Luckily, there are a few metrics that stand out when it comes to providing excellent customer service. Two of the call center metrics that are almost always at or near the top of the list as "most important" are Quality Assurance (QA) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores. But, how can you improve QA scores? And how can you improve CSAT? As the Director of Transformational Services at ScreenSteps — knowledge base software that supports call centers — I've worked with many call centers to create procedural guides and call flows that call center agents can use on calls. These job aids help improve agent performance, and, consequently, QA and CSAT scores. Watch the 3.5-minute video below to learn more about how procedural guides can help improve agent performance in your call center. Plus, I explain more about QA and CSAT scores.

If you've downloaded the workbook to begin capturing your processes, you may be wondering, "How am I supposed to fill this thing out?" To help you out, here's a 5-minute video that walks you through the steps of getting your knowledge out of your head and into a guide.

If you're not familiar with what ScreenSteps is, no worries! We created this helpful video to give you a high level overview of what ScreenSteps is and how it will help you help your call center create better guides for your reps.