Day in the life of a team manager…

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Crikey the CSC isn’t the best at getting these blogs done so I'm delighted to have been the first to post other than Chris’ revealing customer satisfaction posts for the past few months, but that’s because we are all working so hard to provide you the very best in service as you would expect. I normally work within the business team having worked at PlusNet for over 2 years now but over the past month I have been on a secondment as a TSM (Technical Shift Manager) and currently I'm the Floor Manager within the CSC assisting the TSMs on getting all of your contacts to us either by phone, support ticket, or letter handled as efficiently as possible and retaining that award winning quality. Having never focused on team performances so much this has presented various challenges for me over the past few weeks, but in each one its been extremely rewarding to have that challenge given to me. We have also had several other experienced agents stepping up to cover managers in recent weeks, so whilst the managerial side of things may have been lower in experience than normal the enthusiasm and new ideas along with PlusNet experience should have covered this in most circumstances so as not to impact on our customer experience for you contacting us or vice versa. As you may be aware within the CSC we have 3 teams that rotate covering technical calls in addition to customer service and sales calls. These teams also have agents trained to work on ADSL faults either via the initial contact to us or having tested it to handle it once raised to BT. The teams operate on a 4 day working cycle working from 7am to 4pm for the first two days and then from 2pm to 11pm, followed by two days off. So if Team A are in at 7am they are joined by Team B at 2pm so the whole of the main working day and hours are covered, not forgetting an analyst from each team who will also be on nights when they work from 10.45pm until 7.15am. In addition to this we have a Cancellations team, dedicated sales and customer service teams, a provisioning team that handles all activations of various type such as house moves and new sign ups which is called BOT (Broadband Operations Team) and my normal home of Business Support offering support solely for our business customers on our business products. These teams have there own working hours due to business needs such as BOT have to be available when BT are so work 9am until 6pm, the Business team are available from 8am until 8pm. So in handling one of the technical shifts, or as floor manager, what type of things would I have to get involved in? Well it can be quite literally anything. It could be making sure agents are getting their holiday requests sanctioned to taking an escalated customer call. It could be doing QOS where we mark the agent’s performance on randomly selected calls or tickets, it could be being in a performance meeting with the other managers looking at what went right or wrong and what could be done to improve on that. Quite simply we could be asked to do anything and although it may sound clichéd no two days are ever the same. The first thing a manager would do on arriving for their shift would be to make sure we have no staff who have rang in ill. Having done this we can then look at the resource we have available and assign roles for the day so the agents get tasked with their primary role such as call handling and then they know what target levels they should be aiming to perform too. We then need to make sure that our portal statistics have been updated to advise customers of the average ticket and fault handling times. We always try to arrange for scheduled account changes to be done in the morning too if the night shift have been unable to action them so that has to be assigned as customers are expecting to be moved to their new product. We would also need to know what, if any, issues have arisen at work over the previous few hours or so since we were last in that could be impacting for the team upon our arrival. So if any scheduled maintenance has been done has it completed? Has it caused any problems that are then being investigated further to the maintenance? By the time you have done all of this 9am is quickly upon you and the other teams such as BOT start arriving so you then may need to juggle your resource again depending on their work flows and staffing levels. All the team managers will meet around 9am to discuss various resource affecting issues to make sure the whole department is staffed as well as possible. From 9am onwards you start to notice that the call volumes start to rise so hopefully all the hard work we have then put into resource will start to be reflected in answering your queries as quickly as possible. The team manager on shift then has various reports to produce and write up and get these posted to senior management so they can review the performance and we provide them a plan on what will need looking at through the day as main areas of concentration. It could be that due to a higher then average number of sign ups that the BOT team are looking at why some of the orders have failed automatically, it could be a simple reason such as the customer already has ADSL and hasn't provided a MAC but it has to be addressed and we have to show to our senior management that the issues have been seen and more importantly are being addressed. All of a sudden lunchtime is with us and we have to make sure that our staff can go up get their lunch whilst still making sure the calls are being answered promptly. This is an area I have been looking at to try and improve things even more for both staff and our customer experience. As its lunchtime we may well get additional calls from customers who want to ring us on their break but we cant just say to our teams they cant not eat as they have to have fuel in them to get them through the day. As with many things within life its a fine balancing act and I'm in the process of trying various different ways of handling this, some may work well others may not but its a vitally important area we must continue working hard to get even better for you. At 2pm the late shift start so once more resource can be looked at as we have a whole extra team to use for 2hrs until the morning shift leave. It may mean even more call takers for that period, it may mean helping one of the specialist teams such as BOT out with any work flows they have. It could mean that we can then take one of the teams for a team meeting or training which is not possible to do at any other time, but normally Call Answer Rate (CAR) rises dramatically at this time due to being the part of the day when maximum number of staff for the day is in. As a manager you may take this time to use the extra resource to handle 1-2-1's with your team to appraise their monthly performance and to look towards the following month as well as the remaining part of the quarter. Many times during the day you will get asked varied questions from your teams which could either be a quick 30seconds clarifying something and advising them, or it could escalate to an issue that you become part of and may require additional support elements to be involved and could become an issue that could then take a lot more of your time as part of the investigation. We also do constant QOS (Quality of Service) checks on our analysts. This will involve monitoring them via their calls and tickets to help maintain a high standard along with highlighting any development needs for the analysts so those can be addressed as quickly as possible. All the QOS is fedback to the analysts so anything that is positive or negative can be seen and explained as that is the best way for them to develop. We can then assist in team training, and side-by-side coaching. To assist with this we are getting an analyst who will be stepping up as dedicated QOS analyst and they will develop further training plans based on the information they get from results of their work. So as you can see we take this very seriously to make sure that your getting the very best response as you deserve and put a lot of time into getting this as high as possible for you. Hopefully with some of the recent awards we have started to collect this commitment is starting to bear fruit. One of our TSMs Simon posted more on this earlier in the year. To read about it check click http://community.plus.net/csc/2007/07/01/quality-of-customer-support-followup/ Did I also mention the meetings we have to attend throughout the company to see what new things are being done could impact on the CSC, the return to work meetings after staff sickness, making sure our EODs are done from our teams, authorising holiday requests, developing action plans for any agents who have had extended sickness periods or have been missing targets, writing blogs 😉 , covering for other TSMs if away, recruitment telescreening and assessment day planning, escalated calls and tickets Well as you can see this overview of what a TSM has to do is pretty much an endless job and certainly makes our days fly by as we just don’t get time to stop, its a good thing I don’t smoke otherwise I would get serious withdrawal symptoms whilst at work.