How to Define Career Paths in Your Contact Centre

Investing time in creating career paths in your contact centre can pay dividends in improving staff retention and agent morale and even supporting your business continuity planning.

So, are you doing enough to champion your agents’ careers?

To find out what it takes to set out truly transparent and engaging pathways, our Editor – Megan Jones – spoke to Adrian Hawes, Chantal Mitchell, Clare Santos, Dara Kiernan, Jeremy Hyde, John Greenwood, Nathan Dring, and Sirisha Peters to share their top tips and advice.

1. Prioritize Internal Growth Over External Recruitment

A sure-fire way to make sure that career opportunities are nurtured consistently throughout the contact centre is to prioritize internal growth over external recruitment – so everyone is committed to developing their teams, ready to step up into the next role.

“When the entire contact centre is regularly seeing their colleagues being promoted – instead of seeing lots of people join the ranks from external businesses – it creates a great sense of community and possibility.

To champion this approach, we’ve consciously tailored our recruitment strategy to only bring in entry-level people from external businesses. Everything else happens internally from there.” – Jeremy Hyde, Senior Director, Customer Service at Sun Country Airlines

2. Showcase Your Career Paths at the Interview Stage

Don’t wait until your agents join your contact centre to explain what career opportunities are available to them. Talk about it during the interview!

Sadly, the contact centre industry has a reputation for dead-end jobs, and so many people join expecting to fill their time while looking for a more suitable, longer-term opportunity – not aware of the internal opportunities that might be available.

One way to quash this early on is to show potential agents career pathways during the interview stage, so if and when they join the team, they do so with an open mind to the development opportunities available. It’s about making everything positive and transparent from Day 1, so they really can see “what’s in it for me?”

If you are looking for inspiration on opportunities to offer, read our article: 10 Career Progression Opportunities to Offer Your Team

3. Create Stepping-Stone Opportunities to Help Keep People Engaged

Despite your best intentions, some jobs can feel like “Dead Man’s Shoes” roles, where opportunities hardly ever come up to move into that team. This can be very demotivating for others hoping to progress in their careers.

One way to get around this is to create interim roles (temporary opportunities to help out with another department or team) to help ambitious individuals hone their skills ready for when a suitable vacancy does eventually open up. This can be a win–win, particularly during peak season or holiday periods where those left behind can really feel the strain.

You could also rethink your current hierarchy and add more permanent roles that act as stepping stones to success.

For example, you could introduce a coordinator role to sit in between your agents and team leaders, as Chantal Mitchell, Customer Experience Manager at VIVID, shares,

“I quickly recognized that we had lots of advisors that wanted to become team leaders, and the step between those two roles was massive.

So, I put in place a middle position called “Coordinator”, with a view that ambitious advisors could step up to be Coordinators – still doing a bit of call handling and customer work, but also spending time on coaching and quality monitoring and other skills they’d need for when a team leader opportunity opened up.

We’ve seen real success with this approach and three of my sixteen team leaders have come up through this pathway already”.

4. Never EVER Promote People Just on Tenure – It’s Very Demoralizing for the Other Talent Coming Through the Ranks!

When a manager moves on, too often it’s the longest-serving member of the team who steps into their job – with very little objective analysis of their leadership capability.

Proceed with caution here! For any promotion opportunity, you should really be combining long service WITH strong performance AND true leadership potential to find the best person for the role.

Otherwise, you risk demoralizing other members of the team and even accidentally managing them out of the business by them assuming “Sophie will get that job because she’s been here the longest, I might as well move on elsewhere.”

5. Clearly Document the Different Roles in Place Across Your Contact Centre

Take the time to map out of all the job roles across the contact centre categorized into tiers – including their specific roles and responsibilities, as well as the attached compensation package.

That way, it’s very transparent to your people what they need to do to progress from a Tier 1 role into Tier 2 and beyond. Don’t forget to include your back-office roles too, for full visibility of the variety of roles and opportunities across the wider contact centre.

If you’re unsure where to start with creating this map, you can lean into pre-existing frameworks to help, as John Greenwood, Technology Services Director at Customer Contact Panel, explains,

“Did you know there was a project run by The Sector Skills Council for IT, Telecoms and Contact Centres back in 2002 for a Contact Centre Career and Skills Framework?

This mapped out a framework of skills needed in contact centres, which amounted to 14 roles at the time, outlining the degrees of competency and skills requirements needed at each level.

Although over 20 years old, it can still be used as a starter for ten for documenting career pathways in contact centres.”

6. Make Videos to Showcase Job Roles to Other Agents and Departments

Once you’ve mapped out the full range of roles and responsibilities in your contact centre, why not go the extra mile and create some helpful videos about those jobs too?

This can really help to boost awareness across the contact centre about what happens in other teams and inspire others to follow that career path too.

7. Hand Out Paper Passports to Keep Everyone Engaged in Their Direction of Travel

A fun tangible way to engage agents in their career progression is to give everyone a physical passport to keep in their back pocket – personalized with their chosen destination, what they need to do to get there, and space to log their qualifications and experiences as they progress.

This could be used to capture everything from a formal training course to times when they’ve had the opportunity to host a team meeting.

“There are so many little things that can keep personal development ticking along – especially when all this activity is clearly logged.

Giving agents something physical gives them a firm sense of being on their own journey – keeping their development front of mind and within their control. It makes a massive difference.” – Nathan Dring, Founder and Director of Nathan Dring and Associates Limited

This personalized approach also helps agents to choose a career path that motivates them and best meets their aspirations, as Sirisha Peters, Learning and Development Specialist at T3 SA, adds:

8. Publicly Celebrate Everyone as They Progress in Their Careers

Don’t keep progress locked behind closed doors! Make a big deal about it when people pass a qualification or get promoted internally. This will help to keep career progression front of mind for everyone.

“In one contact centre I worked in, there were exams three times a year and we always made sure to celebrate those exam results.

The CEO would even come out with a signed letter to congratulate them when they passed!

It was a great way to showcase success and show other team members what was possible within the contact centre.” – Dara Kiernan, leadership development and contact centre consultant

9. Have Regular (and Honest!) Conversations About the Skills Agents Are Missing

Part of a leader’s role is to develop the skills their team need to get to their next promotion.

So, make sure you’re regularly talking to your agents about their career aspirations, what skills they currently have, what they are missing, and, most importantly, how to build them!

If this doesn’t come naturally to you, it may be helpful to take a more formal approach and engage HR in a competency modelling exercise.

It’s about stopping to think “What does our succession planning look like?”, as Clare Santos, Director, Knowledge & Quality, Customer Experience at Aviso, shares,

“If the leadership team is always thinking, “Who will be next for that role?” and “What do they need?”, the cultural norm will always be focused on getting there. You can’t just wait until someone leaves to give it your attention! You have to have a plan!”

For tips and advice on how to conduct a skills audit and put together a coaching plan to improve staff, read our article: How to Conduct a Skills Audit and Coaching Plan

10. Always Think of Your Contact Centre as a Talent Factory

And finally, one of the best ways to embed career paths into your cultural mindset is to always see yourselves as a talent factory or academy to project people into other roles – even outside of customer service.

“I personally believe that we should see contact centres almost as an academy for the broader organization and always be preparing people to be able to move on.

Particularly as the more people you can feed out into other departments, the more the first-hand experience of seeing what the customer sees will filter into your company culture – benefiting your end-to-end customer journey in the long run.” – Adrian Hawes, Director at Select Planning Limited

This approach is in full swing at BUPA too, as Jane Redgrave, Head of Consumer Retention, shares in this quick video interview:

What Have You Tried to Create Clear Career Paths for Agents?

Join our LinkedIn community and let us know.

With thanks to the following people for sharing their thoughts and experiences for this article:

• Adrian Hawes, Director at Select Planning Limited
• Chantal Mitchell, Customer Experience Manager at VIVID
• Clare Santos, Director, Knowledge & Quality, Customer Experience at Aviso
• Dara Kiernan, leadership development and contact centre consultant
• Jeremy Hyde, Senior Director, Customer Service at Sun Country Airlines
• John Greenwood, Technology Services Director at Customer Contact Panel
• Nathan Dring, Founder and Director of Nathan Dring and Associates Limited
• Sirisha Peters, Learning and Development Specialist at T3 SA

Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson