But there still remains a fundamental gap that call centers are trying to fill. That gap is a standard for training and evaluating call center managers. There are organizations that are working to address this gap, such as the Incoming Calls Management Institute, which has offered training to call center managers since 1985, and the Call Center Industry Advisory Council, an organization that last month announced a new certification program for managers. Serving customers is more challenging than ever, especially now that companies are setting higher standards for their call centers. Gone are the days when a company could claim it had a viable customer service operation simply because it sat a group of agents near a bank of phones.
Companies now expect call centers to make money.
They expect call centers to justify their investments in the systems they install and in the agents whom they hire. To manage a call center, you now have to know how to run a business. What makes your job even more complex is that you don't necessarily manage agents from a central location. There was a time when it was most convenient to hire agents to work at one building that contained special equipment to handle large numbers of calls. But with the presence of the Internet and the growing availability of high-speed data services, agents don't necessarily need to serve customers from the same place.