"In the past, I have jumped to conclusions too quuickly when trying to address challenges. As a result, time and money were spent in the wrong areas. My strategy now is different - take a long, hard, holistic look at the call centre and understand the root causes of issues before trying to tackle them."

"Had AHT in rep incentive at one time. Drove the wrong behavior for at least a segment of reps. Have eliminated it from incentive. We still manage it, but in a different way - through coaching on skills and behaviors, not numbers."

"Understaffing. As a first exercise in preparing for customer acquisition, it was unclear regarding the volume of customer inquiries that would arrive as a result of a change of ownership for a company. Using the known trend data from my current team and the volume data from the company that was to be acquired, I properly projected new hiring for "normal conditions" but failed to have an overflow plan in place for an unusual call pattern. Unfortunately, the day after acquisition the systems failed for the acquired company and my staff was not prepared for the incoming volume. It took a month to recover from the incident and by that time we had lost a small percentage of customer base as a result. For the next acquisition, I made sure to be better prepared. I had increased the workforce for the first two weeks of acquiring the new organization to handle the influx of volume, and I had an overflow scenario planned which involved borrowing resources from other departments should the volume reach certain excess levels. With a better contingency plan, there was less panic and more efficiency when providing customers with a first impression of your contact center. The end result is a more loyal customer base."

"My biggest mistake was trying to implement two systems at once. I was a brand new manager and I tried to implement a telecom system and a new software system at the same time. Needless to say, I learned I needed to ask more questions and to talk to others with more experience than myself to get a better idea of what to expect. In the end, everything worked out, but now, I always make sure I spend more time in the asking questions mode and talk to my peers before jumping head first into any similar projects."

"I'm too softhearted to staff and people use this. I've learned that this is a mistake."

"greatest mistake, to cross the line in between work and friendship....
difficult choice to make: keep friend or find co-worker?"

"My biggest mistake was allowing the Outbound reps to develop their own process. When we recognized that this was causing work orders to slip through the cracks, we created, trained and began to monitor one method for all Outbound reps. It has reduced the number of issues being passed from one shift to the next and is helping us to gain efficiencies because the work is being completed more quickly."

"confusing my agents by allowing clients to get overly involved in their campaigns; giving direct feedback to agents, directing call scrips etc.
the agent has to have a single boss, and the client too has to have a single point of contact to make him feel sufficiently involved."

"Spending too much time in my office and not enough out meeting the people that work with me."

"Moving to fast on reducing headcount and implementing new procedures and technology to the center, caused a lot of ill will between the management and agents. We stepped back and started educating everyone on what was happening, communication became priority one."

"Running a big call centre is a challenge. What should be done earlier is to segmentised the contact centre and manned by operations managers and inculcate challenge amongst teams to perform better."

"Sometimes I become over aggressive and set targets that really are stretch targets, All in an effort to drive results, I need to learn to be more realistic and understand that not everyone sets the same expectations for themselves as I do."

"Develop unnecessary system"

"Revising a training curriculum to push agents from the classroom to production too soon. The issue was resolved by increased continuing education courses that eventually benefited all new hires and veteran agents alike."

"I think like many people who run Call/Customer Service centres you suffer from number blindness. You get so many reports about different things its hard to focus on what the important stuff is. Think about the sort of image the business wants to depict and match you customer service to that, align your KPI's around delivering that vision."

"My biggest mistake was more of a personal than a professional one. I am a very open person and I enjoy getting to know the members of my teams. I have at times had to take care that I am striking the correct balance between getting to know people and maintaining professional relationships."

"Taking responsibility for a start-up cross cultural center presented many challenges. One of my biggest mistakes was trying to define and create systems exactly as I envisioned them. Recovery was the recognition/realization that it wasn't the process but the results that matter. Changing focus from creating systems and SOP's, I instead focused on finding talent that could learn quickly what results were required and could then build the systems and processes needed to achieve that vision in a way that the new culture could relate to and be successful in."

"HANDLING THE EMPLOYMENT PROCESS. IT SHOULD BE LEFT TO HR OR A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL.I WOULD RATHER FOCUS IN MY AREA OF CORE COMPETENCE. A NON PERFORMING STAFF SHOULD BE FIRED IF HE CANNOT IMPROVE."