Breaking Down the Operations Side of Call Centers

The great philosopher Aristotle said: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

There is no truer case than that of call center operations.

While it wasn’t quite what Aristotle had in mind, a successful call center comprises a wide variety of roles and responsibilities. And it takes all of them working together for the call center to perform at a high level.

In every call center, you have different roles:

• Call center manager/director
• Call center supervisor
• Contact center agent
• Workforce management specialist
• Quality assurance analyst
• IT and systems admin
• Telecommunications service provider liaison
• Data analyst

When all team members work toward a common goal and know exactly what their role comprises (and its impact on the wider business), call center operations become smooth and successful.

Let’s break down the eight key roles you can expect to find in a modern call center.

What Are the Roles in Call Center Operations?

1. Call center manager/director

While the quirks of effective call center management will differ from business to business, the manager’s main responsibility is to oversee overall call center operations, including staffing, performance management, and goal setting.

The call center manager must be an effective leader and be versed in managing call volume, forecasting, and staff scheduling to meet customer demand.

However, this role will not be as hands-on as a call center agent. The expectation is not to handle calls or even many escalations (with some exceptions). Instead, the manager ensures the right people with the right skill sets are available to handle all types of calls at any given time.

As part of the role, the call center manager will develop policies and procedures to ensure consistent service delivery and adherence to company goals. While responsible for their own business unit, the success of the entire company must always be on their radar.

More than anything else, they will provide leadership and support to the entire call center team, from agents to supervisors. This includes monitoring employee engagement and burnout as well as looking after the figures for call center success.

Without a leader (not just a manager), your call center may zigzag without proper direction or alignment.

• Primary objective: Ensure the team is adequately staffed and supported and meets targets for the entire contact center.
• Suggested metrics: Service level, AHT, and ASA

2. Call center supervisor

Your supervisors (or team leaders) will directly manage teams of call center agents, providing onboarding, coaching, and performance feedback. Unlike a manager or director, this role does concern itself with the active day-to-day management of agents and focuses less on the bigger picture.

While each task will feed into a wider plan, key activities often include:

• Tracking real-time agent performance
• Ensuring adherence to scripts
• Checking for consistent call quality
• Measuring productivity metrics
• Providing one-to-one and group training
• Handling escalations

The supervisor is responsible for ensuring that their team members meet their individual and team key performance indicators (KPIs), such as AHT and FCR. This includes developing agents and monitoring day-to-day performance and customer issues.

• Primary objective: Look after day-to-day operations and handle escalations and complex issues.
• Suggested metrics: AHT, FCR, and CSAT

3. Inbound/outbound call center agent

You can’t start a call center without agents. There are three types of agents within a call center:

• Inbound: Handles customer interactions, complaints, or support requests
• Outbound: Engages in proactive calling activity like sales calls, follow-ups, or collections
• Blended: Combines inbound and outbound, usually associated with customer service or technical support

Agents must adhere to call scripts, maintain professionalism, and ensure customer satisfaction. These are the minimum expectations for any call center agent. Rather than forming their own sales patter or troubleshooting steps, agents will be provided with structured scripts.

💡💡 Suggestion: Take advantage of AI Agent Assist to help agents with difficult queries and show prompts for suggested replies and next steps.

Following the conclusion of customer calls, agents routinely document call outcomes and update a customer relationship manager (CRM) system as needed.

You can use artificial intelligence (AI) here, too. Some tools (like Nextiva) automatically suggest notes to add to a call — or even add a full transcription and a summary with keyword and sentiment highlights throughout.

Agents are expected to meet individual KPIs throughout the day, week, and month.

These often include:

• Call quality scores
• Call volume targets
• Average wait times
• First call resolution rate
• Average speed of answer
• Customer loyalty metrics
• Customer satisfaction metrics
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Customer retention metrics

• Primary objective: Handle inbound queries and proactively reach out to customers.
• Suggested metrics: Call volume, FCR, and CSAT

4. Workforce management specialist

Whether you use the term workforce engagement or workforce management (WFM), this role creates and manages staff schedules to ensure adequate coverage based on call volume forecasts.

The main responsibility of a WFM manager is to develop forecasting models to predict peak call times and staffing needs. However, when the situation demands, they must also start call monitoring in real time and adjust staffing as needed.

To get call center workforce management right, you must be methodical and data-oriented. You must also be able to adapt to unexpected changes in planned call volumes. For example, if your online portal suffers an outage, there will be a sudden influx of phone calls.

The WFM manager is responsible for implementing a backup staff model. This may involve pulling in extra resources from other teams, creating an overflow of standby agents, or passively making an outsourced call center available.

A WFM manager will analyze call center metrics like agent availability, adherence to schedules, and shrinkage on a long-term basis. These metrics feed into the next versions of staff rotas and various models ready for future implementation.

• Primary objective: Ensure sufficient staffing levels based on historical trends and changing scenarios.
• Suggested metrics: Service level, call center shrinkage, and agent availability rate

5. Quality assurance analyst

Call center quality assurance (QA) is one of the most important yet often overlooked roles in a call center. Ensuring everyone is productive and maintaining the expected standards means your call center is performing at high levels.

A QA analyst will monitor and evaluate a sample of agent calls to ensure adherence to company standards and scripts. They aim to score calls based on criteria like tone, problem-solving ability, compliance, and customer engagement.

🚀🚀 Suggestion: Use sentiment analysis and voice analytics to automatically flag the calls that need attention.

Once calls and agents have been scored, analysts will provide feedback to supervisors and agents, identifying training needs and areas for improvement.

Sometimes, the outcome may not be a change in agent performance but a change in process or scripts. The QA analysts may not have the overall say regarding change, but they are a major contributor with valuable input.

• Primary objective: Ensure agents provide the expected service levels and adhere to scripts and brand guidelines.
• Suggested metrics: Customer sentiment, NPS, and CSAT

6. IT and systems admin

While not working directly in a call center, an IT admin plays a vital role by overseeing the call center’s technical infrastructure, including telephony systems, CRM software, and call recording tools.

Without any of these key systems, the call center would grind to a halt. Hence, managing system upgrades, troubleshooting technical issues, and ensuring system uptime are not to be ignored when planning call center operations.

This technical resource will work closely with service providers and vendors to maintain the call center’s communication systems. Expect regular conversations between supervisors, managers, and IT teams to ensure an always-optimal technical setup for your agents.

The IT and systems team will likely be tasked with implementing security protocols to protect customer data. You’ll also need to engage them to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS.

• Primary objective: Manage key telecoms and call center systems infrastructure to ensure optimal call center staff performance.
• Suggested metrics: Service level, call abandonment rate, and queue level

Related: How to Master Call Center PCI Compliance (So It Won’t Cost You!)

7. Telecommunications service provider liaison

In larger businesses, there may be a split between IT and telecoms responsibilities. If you need to make ongoing changes to users, interactive voice response systems, and call queues, you may have a dedicated resource to act as the primary contact between the call center and its telecommunications providers.

The responsibility here is to ensure that all phone numbers, call routing, and self-service communication infrastructure are optimized for call center operations and that callers get to the right place in the fastest time.

Aside from managing day-to-day and planned changes to telecoms infrastructure, this role may also be tasked with longer-term activities like:

• Managing contracts
• Negotiating service-level agreements
• Handling billing inquiries with external vendors
• Staying up to date with new call center technology and services

• Primary objective: Act as the middle ground between the call center and the telecom service provider to ensure your business has the best technology at the best price.
• Suggested metrics: Service level, FCR, and AHT

8. Data analyst

In large teams or those with high call volumes, it’s not uncommon to have a dedicated data analyst to collect and analyze call data and call center analytics.

These will differ from business to business, but they often include:

• Number of calls
• Average handle time
• First call resolution rate
• CSAT scores

With access to this data, an analyst gets tasked with generating reports that provide insights into call center performance and identify areas for improvement.

This information then supports decision-making, such as staffing adjustments, script revisions, or process improvements. In a way, this role is like that of a QA analyst. The main difference is that a data analyst only examines data, charts, and analytics rather than customer feedback.

In smaller businesses, it’s common for QA analyst and data analyst roles to overlap.

• Primary objective: Analyze call center data to leverage insights that drive positive business decisions.
• Suggested metrics: AHT, FCR, and CSAT

Why Each Role Plays a Key Part in Call Center Operations

Every role in the call center plays a critical part in ensuring a smooth, efficient, and effective workflow.

Without agents, there is nobody to answer incoming calls. Without the appropriate leadership, support, and backing by data and processes, everything could spiral out of control.

Call centers can boost productivity, meet customer expectations, and improve overall performance by clearly defining responsibilities and ensuring collaboration across roles.

You can lean on comprehensive call center software like Nextiva to make everyone’s lives easier and achieve the goals of your call center operations.

With Nextiva, you get:

• A unified customer experience platform
• Supervisor dashboards and wallboards
• The automation of wrap-up tasks and notetaking
• AI assistance for real-time calls and transcripts
• Workforce management and staff scheduling insights
• Voice analytics including sentiment analysis and agent scores
• Integration with leading CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho
• Omnichannel support of other communication channels like chatbots, SMS, and social media