If you are an ambitious and dynamic person seeking out the best opportunities to build your career in the contact center industry, then you have come to the right place!
Contact centers are part of the thriving BPM industry and offer myriad opportunities for building a long term career, especially in the customer service domain. In addition to the more known contact center executive roles, there are many allied functions that you can venture into. While a customer service associate front ends the conversations, it’s a team effort where different people like trainers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and Quality Analysts (QAs) work in the back-end to ensure a spectacular customer experience. Here’s a quick overview of these different roles. After having gained valuable experience as a contact center associate, based upon your interest and skills, you can choose a work profile that might be the right fit for you for career progression.
Team leader- Customer Service Track
Typically, after having spent a couple of years as a customer service executive in a contact center, you would have had a fair amount of exposure to the career path of an associate. In fact, many seasoned leaders in the industry have started their careers as customer service associates. The roles that you will find in this scenario are that of Team Leader, Manager, etc. leading up to be a Program Manager, Director, and Vice President. The first milestone in this journey is to be a team leader (TL). A team leader handles escalations, offers guidance on how to handle a request, coaches & motivates associates, and manages the team’s performance. As you progress along this path to higher levels, your responsibilities will expand from managing your team’s performance to overseeing your team’s delivery of customer service over single/multiple channels, managing service delivery for a particular customer to owning and managing customer engagement for a group of client accounts.
Specialized Contact Center Executive Roles
These are specialized customer service and support roles that require a specific skill set over and above the primary skills required for a customer service associate in a BPO setting. Some of these roles include Customer Support Engineer, Multilingual Customer Support Specialist, and Technical Support Specialist. You can leverage your specialized abilities to your advantage as these skills are high in demand.
Subject Matter Expert (SME)
A subject matter expert is an individual contributor, a domain expert who typically does not have people responsibilities but is a specialist in a particular field. He is an expert and a designated resource for assistance and up-to-date information on specific products, services, policies, processes, or business areas. The customer service associates consult the SME for nuanced understanding and finer details of a topic, to respond correctly and quickly in situations that demand deep understanding and knowledge. This role can be a natural extension for a tenured associate who has already gained valuable experience in his role and has a passion for learning to become an authority on a particular topic.
Trainer
With the continuous influx of fresh talent pool into contact center jobs, there is a growing demand for trainers who train these candidates for acing customer interactions. The training includes enhancing language proficiency, cultural nuances, product and platform training, and many other related topics so that agents can become successful from the first day on the job. As a tenured associate, you can explore training as a potential career track if working with and coaching people is your passion. Being an experienced associate, the new candidates can benefit immensely from your real-life experience when you get into the role of a trainer. You can help new folks get up to speed, understand the culture, and start contributing quickly. Helping people excel can be a source of such a sense of pride professionally and personally!
Quality Assurance Analyst
The fundamental mandate for contact centers is delivering quality interactions and frictionless customer experience. With thousands of interactions taking place every day, an organization requires a dedicated team who will be ensuring that quality standards, as defined by the client and the organization, are being met consistently – areas for enhancing the performance are spotted proactively, and any corrective measures required are introduced immediately. A quality analyst is responsible for monitoring call quality and providing actionable insights.
As you can see, after having aced customer conversations through service and support, you have many directions in which you could take your career in to. Being a customer service associate is just the first step in what would be an exciting, gratifying, and fruitful career journey.