The Call Center School recently surveyed hundreds of call center supervisors and discovered that around 80 percent of managers had been promoted from within. This is an excellent way to promote staff retention and makes for easier recruiting. However, when promoting call center staff to supervisory positions rather than searching for outside candidates, it is important to realize that extra training is often necessary. Here are some of the key areas of management in which new supervisors require training.

Recruiting and hiring
Supervisors will be in charge of front-line staff and consequently need to be made part of the hiring process. These individuals will know how new employees will fit in with the rest of staff and whether or not they will be valuable workers. However, knowing how to conduct an interview and elicit telling responses from prospective agents can be difficult. Supervisors need to be taught which questions will result in revealing answers, as well as how best to judge people who are applying for a job.

Motivation
Bringing out the best in a workforce will be one of the primary duties of a call center supervisor. This means that the many techniques that motivate workers are important for supervisors to understand. They should be made to realize what motivational resources were used in their own development and can even try to come up with new and creative ways to draw the best work out of agents.

Performance standards
Supervisors will be at the forefront of efforts to measure and ensure staff success. They will require a thorough examination of the ways in which call centers evaluate good performance and prevent poor performance. Additionally, the metrics that are used to determine success and failure need to be made clear so that supervisors can understand when staff have, and have not achieved their goals.

Staffing and scheduling
The first person to be confronted by staff when there is a scheduling issue will assuredly be a supervisor. Supervisors need to understand how staffing and scheduling are done so that they can best explain the scheduling policies to their agents. Additionally, supervisors will be in a mediating role between agents and managers when staffing problems need to be resolved.