Aiming Higher (Part 1): The BPO Management Crisis

What does every call center agent aspire to become when they first enter the industry? It’s usually in the form of two letter words; namely TL (Team Leader) and for those who dream further; OM (Operations Manager). However, aspirations change along the way and agents begin to lose sight of their goals. Many factors come into play but a lot of these are still controllable. The only thing I see that hinders people from moving up in the industry is not the external factors but their own selves.

The call center industry is one of the fairest industries you could ever be in. BPO Companies don’t care if you have a fancy degree (like in my case) or if you are God’s gift to the call center industry! They don’t care about trivial things like age, gender and sexual orientation. They even accept people with physical disabilities (I actually had a trainee who only had one arm and amazingly he is working in an email account. Believe it or not, his email handling time was better than many people with both arms). However for the emotional and mentally disabled, there is still a center for them but it’s definitely not a BPO company, if you know what I mean.

Seriously, in this industry you literally start from the bottom and move yourself up from there. That’s a remarkable practice because I believe that good leaders must first be good followers. I have known many managers from other industries who entered the call center industry into a management position and sad to say that their leadership skills need a lot of work. Leading and managing people are two different things and I firmly believe that you first have to begin from the bottom to make it to the top. That’s what will make your journey more memorable and worthwhile.

A recent article in the Inquirer, Lack of management talent dogs BPO firms, prompted me to begin writing this series of blogs here entitled Aiming Higher, to look into the lack of management talent available and how people in this industry should strive to continue working towards that elusive management goal. With the Philippines having been declared the top destination for customer service outsourcing, the need for more BPO managers is greater than ever.

In my honest opinion, managers who have been bred and groomed within the BPO industry outperform those who come in from other industries. Non-BPO managers would never understand the fact that driving metrics is not just an objective but it requires a great understanding of call center agent psyche. How would they know what this is if they’ve never taken a call, themselves, in this lifetime?

How can managers who haven’t taken calls before ever hope to motivate an agent crying in a corner because some overly irate customer just destroyed her dignity? If you study the trend, many voice accounts (especially outbound sales) have attrition rates that would shock you. I know this because when I was an outbound team leader, there was a time I lost an entire team! Managers who have experienced the hardships of being an agent are more compassionate to the plight of the people they handle; having experienced the same themselves.

Another thing I have seen many non-BPO managers bring into the industry is politics and I am strictly against any form of office politics as it hinders productivity and creates breaks in crucial working relationships. The call center world depends highly on team work and any manager who can’t foster that quality in their accounts are better off working somewhere else.

If you’ve got the heart and passion for leading teams towards success, I encourage you to read the next blogs I will be posting in this series. You might just be the answer to this “BPO management crisis”.

Dr. France Jagolino is currently an Operations Manager for TaskUs Integrated Solutions, a California based outsourcing company. He gave up a promising career in Medicine to enter the BPO Industry where he has worked in almost every position from agent to trainer all the way to management. Dr. Jagolino is not only an experienced veteran of the industry but has also worked as a Leadership and Management Training Consultant for Shell and has written numerous articles on leadership, management, business, healthcare, customer service, social media and self-improvement. He is also a former TESDA Instructor for English Proficiency/Call Center Training and an inspirational speaker who was spoken in leadership motivation seminars in Asia and the Middle East.

Read more of this writing on:

www.k-zenzbox.com

www.leadersdirect.net

www.smartersocialmedia.com

Posted in: CallCenter Advices,France