How to Create Amazing Team Leaders
With Marc Carriere, Course Creator of the 7 Pillars for Creating Amazing Team Leaders
Show Notes
Marc Carriere is the creator of the 7 Pillars for Creating Amazing Team Leaders course.
With 35 years’ international experience in the contact centre industry, Marc has managed contact centes, owned one, won industry awards, and consulted with businesses, coaching and mentoring their Contact Centre Managers and Team Leaders.
Today, he shares how to create amazing team leaders.
The approach Marc takes when training Team Leaders:
Ensure they know their role and responsibilities, with respect to being a Team Leader, and the interactions they have with their Centre Manager. Otherwise, it can be unclear who’s supposed to do what, when (06:44).
Have them stop doing activities which an admin person or HR person should be doing, so they have the time needed to train and coach their team (08:11).
Teach them how to give effective training and feedback to their team (09:08).
Create a coachable call structure, that sets out the steps of a call, which Team Leaders can coach to (09:23).
Have them monitor recorded calls, which they score and give feedback on (11:09).
Have them run pre-shift meetings, to get their people prepared and focused for the shift ahead (12:05).
Have them do skills audits to identify what areas their agents need help with (12:55).
You'll Learn:
Why Team Leaders are the backbone of any contact centre operation (02:56).
How most Team Leaders are missing fundamental skill sets to be effective leaders (05:01).
The key to effective time management (13:52).
How a coaching call structure differs from quality guidelines (15:15).
Connect with Marc on LinkedIn.
Get Marc’s free course, 7 Pillars For Creating Amazing Team Leaders Who Coach, Nurture And Lead Winning Teams
Check out Marc’s website and YouTube channel for more for more resources.
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership System enables contact centres to increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets.
Today I'm joined by Marc Carriere from Marketing Tactics. Marc is the creator of the 7 Pillars for Creating Amazing Team Leaders course. Marc, welcome along, great to have you.
Marc Carriere (00:29)
Blair, thanks so much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. And share some insights, hopefully, with your audience that they might find useful, and things that they can apply.
Blair Stevenson (00:43)
You're most welcome. As a starting point, just briefly, tell us a bit about yourself.
Marc Carriere (00:48)
Over the last 35 years, I've worked in the trenches, in effect, managing marketing departments that have had call centres, with as high as 176 seats.
I've won industry awards for Call Centre of the Year, and had staff that I've worked with and coached that have won Call Centre Manager of the Year and Telemarketer of the Year. And I've consulted with small and large companies all over the place.
I've lived and worked in eight different countries around the world. And having owned a call centre myself in Australia, way back when, I'm certainly aware of the difficulties in creating amazing Team Leaders.
And when COVID hit, I decided to think about what I was doing, like a lot of us did, and I created a YouTube channel called the Team leader Training Channel. And I've got over 60 videos on training tips for Team Leaders and things for Call Centre Managers to deal with Team Leaders.
And as you mentioned earlier, I developed the 7 Pillars for Creating Amazing Team Leaders course, and that's got 14 lessons and 17 different resources, tools, and templates that the participants can customise virtually for any call center operation.
And they can access that through either a self-paced online course through my learning management system, or they can participate with me in mastermind groups that I do with other like-minded people, where I work with them one-on-one with the group and help them with the lessons and customise the materials, and do that over a four week period.
That's pretty much what I'm up to these days.
Blair Stevenson (02:48)
Cool. So we're talking Team Leaders. How critical do you consider Team Leaders to contact centre culture and performance?
Marc Carriere (02:56)
Team Leaders are very critical. In my view, they're the backbone, they're the spine of any call centre operation.
They're as important as, to use an analogy, as sergeants are to an army unit. How many armed forces would you have where they wouldn't have sergeants? You know, just send them out with officers. You need the sergeants there because they're the ones that work with them every second of every shift.
If you've got a really good Team Leader, their team will soar, there's no question. And if you've got a bad one, they'll crush them. I remember one of my clients here on the Gold Coast comes to mind. I was working with them and one Team Leader, Penny, she was amazing.
She was very nurturing, but still held herself and her team accountable and worked with them, and coached them. Everybody loved working with her and her team was always hitting their targets and KPIs.
And then you have this other fellow, Peter. A nice enough guy, but he was one of these really regimented hardass kind of people. It was like he walked around when he got out from behind his desk as if he had a whip in hand. Yeah, they would hit their targets every now and again, but he kept losing people all the time because nobody wanted to work with him.
That's why they're really critical.
Blair Stevenson (04:41)
Totally. You used a military analogy earlier. One of the things that we know about the military is they're constantly training people. Given your extensive contact centre experience, how many contact centres have you been in where they actually have an effective Team Leader training program in place?
Marc Carriere (05:01)
Well, sadly to say, very few in my experience. That could be because the ones that really have good, effective training for Team Leaders, don't ask me to come and help them. That might have something to do with it.
But in my experience, typically what happens with Team Leaders is that a Call Centre Manager, their natural progression quite often is as a Team Leader themselves. And many of them didn't have any formal training. They got training every now and again in different things, but they basically learned on the job.
And so they know what they know, and they try to educate, teach and coach people based on what they know with respect to the job. And a lot of them are subject matter masters. and they think that what they need to do. Because they haven't had a lot of formal training themselves, they don't know what they don't know. And so they don't provide that, unless they do ad hoc trainings every now and again. And that comes up often.
But when you look at the fundamental skill sets, and more than an army analogy is, think of athletics. There's a lot of things that you need to do as a coach in athletics in terms of fundamentals. And a lot of these people don't have that understanding. They know a couple of things, but they don't know the overall, if that makes sense.
Blair Stevenson (06:40)
So what's special about the approach that you take to Team Leader training?
Marc Carriere (06:44)
I like to make sure that they have all the basic fundamentals. And that would start with understanding the role and responsibilities, with respect to being a Team Leader, but also in terms of the interactions they have with the Call Centre Manager.
I always remember another client. I was working with their Team Leader that looked after people and they would operate the dialer and all of this. One of the owners of the company comes running in while I'm training with her and working with her, and starts jumping up and down with the dialers not working and this isn't happening and what's going on. And then pulls in the Call Centre Manager, and they're all pointing fingers at each other and I'm just thinking to myself, "Don't you guys know who's supposed to do what, when?"
So then we did an exercise with them that listed all the activities each of them were supposed to do and when. You know, the Call Center Manager does these things, but doesn't have to tell the Team Leader, the Team Leader does these things, but has to tell the Call Centre Manager and. All those things to make it clear.
The other thing is time management. It's amazing how people don't use their time effectively. And you talk to a lot of people, Team Leaders and Call Centre Managers for that matter. And you ask them, "Do you do as much training or coaching as you think you'd like to?" And they go, "Oh no. I do do some, but geez, I wish I had more time to do other things." And you say, "Well, why don't you?" And they say, "Well, I've got all these other things to do."
And when you drill down on those things, a lot of those activities really are related to things that maybe an admin person or an HR person should be doing. And in effect, what's going on is that they're using these other activities as their excuse for not having the time to do the training, when really, the fact of the matter when you drill down comes to, they don't know how to.
They don't know how to train effectively. They don't know how to provide feedback effectively. So they find these other things as excuses.
Another thing I think is core to everything that comes out is having a coachable call structure, and helping the Team Leaders understand that structure so they can coach it. And I'm not just talking about a call guide. Certainly, call guides can come from those. But the structure lays out every part of the conversation of the call from start to finish. And understanding how each element is important and needs to be achieved before they go on to the next part of that.
Oftentimes you speak with, particularly in tele-sales, you ask the frontline operators, "What do you need help in?" And invariably, they're going to tell you, "Oh, in closing and handling objections. That's where I really need the help." And then when you listen to a lot of their calls, they're losing people way back in the hello.
Of course they need help with closing and handling objections because they haven't earned the right to actually ask for the order. And the thing is, they've missed all these other step to get to that point.
And so a Call Centre Manager needs to make sure their Team Leaders understand what their call structure is all about, so they can identify it. So that way, when they do call monitoring, call scoring, they know what to look for. And some of the deficiencies that pop up, they can identify those much more easily and score the call.
And then that leads to providing the feedback on the calls that they monitored, and identifying the areas where people can help. And I love people scoring recorded calls, because that way they can use the feedback session as a bit of a training as well, where they can say, "Well, listen, see here. Hear what happened here? Had you done this, but you missed that step now. That's why it's important."
And so when everybody understands the process, you've got something to work to. And that leads to conducting skills audits quarterly, and developing coaching plans. Even getting team buy-in, that's something that I think is really important Team Leaders need to have a good understanding of.
And as odd as it may seem, running pre-shift meetings. It's one of my bugbears, most Team Leaders don't know how to run a pre-shift meeting, and how to do that effectively. Because those meetings are all about getting people's minds prepared for what they're going to do. It's what I call doing a ‘checkup from the neck up’.
There's so much going on in their lives, you've got to clear all of that, and most shifts run for six hours, roughly. Some more, some less. But you need to get them prepared and focused mentally for what they're about to do. And there's not a lot of things that they need to learn how to run them, but they need to keep them focused on those things.
And then understanding all the different reports, and understanding what metrics are important and how they're interrelated. Both from a collective team perspective, but also from an individual team member's perspective. They need to identify, "Okay, I've got a few people that are having this type of problem." And that really can come out with your skills audits as well.
And then you can devise a training program or classes to handle specific things. If you're not a subject matter expert, you can get somebody from the training team to come in and work with these people specifically.
Blair Stevenson (13:42)
Just keen to pick up on a couple of things that you mentioned. One is time management, which you're absolutely right. What do you believe is the key to effective time management?
Marc Carriere (13:52)
Well, I think the key is understanding. And this is an understanding between the Call Centre Manager and the Team Leader, with respect to what they want to make sure happens. Now, in effect, any team that is being run out there, generally you've got somewhere between 30 to 40 or even 50% of the team who are new or under-performers, or are getting good.
So you need to make sure that you're scheduling time throughout the week to work with some of these operators. And that means you've got a schedule time to monitor calls. And as I said before, I prefer recorded calls. And it takes time to find them sometimes. So you've got to put an hour together to find 2 or 3, 10 to 15 minute calls that you can actually score to use later for a feedback or training session.
Blair Stevenson (14:55)
You used the term 'scoring'. I know most contact centres already have quality guidelines for their call monitoring. You talked about a coachable call structure. How does that differ from a call quality structure? Or is it the same thing?
Marc Carriere (15:15)
I think they're two different things. You've got one that's QA (Quality Assurance). The QA team, they'll take it down to the molecular level. They can get really detailed. And quite often I don't find that those reports are that effective for Team Leaders in a training session, because it goes into too much minutia. And there's reasons for that, because a lot of companies have to be very concerned about the brand, and how the brand is being protected and things like that.
So certainly you need to do QA, but assuming QA is covering the brand thing, in terms of operationally and sales or generating customer service or whatever, if you have a scoring model based on your coachable call structure, that identifies each of those areas, I find what happens is that that can be a lot more effective for Team Leaders. Because it can be very quick for them to score.
If they're going through a QA thing, it could be too much information and they just don't use it.
Blair Stevenson (16:34)
So would I be right in thinking that in your view, call quality is really about compliance, whereas coachable call structure is really about performance?
Marc Carriere (16:47)
That's a good way of putting it. A coachable call structure lays out the foundations and the goalposts, milestones, from the start to the end of a call and all the steps in there leading to the end result, the outcome you're looking for. Be that a sales call, be that a customer service complaint resolution, be that an inbound call, an outbound call. All those things.
Quality Assurance can incorporate a lot of those, and usually does. But I think in terms of a training tool, that coachable call structure is something that's critical.
Blair Stevenson (17:30)
Yeah. Cool. I know you talk about the '7 Pillars for Creating Amazing Team Leaders. I think we've talked about a couple of them. One was around time management and the other one is around a coachable call structure. What's what other of those key pillars.
Marc Carriere (17:50)
The other one would be well call monitoring and scoring, conducting skills audits, creating coaching plans. Those things that I've just talked about, those are involved in the 7 pillars, definitely.
Blair Stevenson (18:06)
Cool. Brilliant. Okay. So if people want to talk to you about Team Leader training or want to understand more about those 7 Pillars for Creating an Amazing Team Leader, how do they contact you?
Marc Carriere (18:19):
They can get in touch with me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to connect with people there. They can follow me there on LinkedIn. I have a company page specifically for call centre Team Leaders. They can send me an email, or they can visit my website, www.marccarriere.net. And I think you'll have all of those down in the notes below, won't you?
Blair Stevenson (18:51)
I will. Marc, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Well, that's it from us today, for listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Marc on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marccarriere/), as he mentioned, you'll find the link to his LinkedIn profile and to his website in the description too.
And if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonblair/), you'll find links to my profile there as well. Well, that's it from us today, have a productive week.