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ETC's Team Leader Readiness Simulation Tool By Call Center Magazine
One of the hidden secrets to agent satisfaction is: better supervisors. Agents will stay in the job longer, and be more productive members of a team, if they have a supervisor that they feel they can work well with. But the industry pays a lot more attention to agent training than to supervisor training. It's not enough just to promote agents to supervisory positions based on your gut feeling that he or she is up to the job. To really make smart choices about who to career path, you should use the same sort of unbiased filtering and assessment tools that you use to pre-select agents. Hence, Employment Technologies' (Winter Park, FL) Team Leader Readiness Simulation (TLRS), a highly realistic, multimedia assessment that depicts a typical day in the life of a team leader. This PC-delivered simulation requires participants to assume the role of a newly hired team leader. As part of the simulation, participants must handle a series of challenging situations that require them to:
The simulation automatically provides participants with all of the information they need to complete the assessment, including a realistic preview of the team leader job, complete assessment instructions, and a practice opportunity. Participants then have an hour and 45 minutes to complete the assessment. The results provide a prediction of each participant's potential for success as well as valuable feedback on skill strengths and developmental needs. The simulated scenarios, which Employment Technologies presents to would-be team leaders to gauge their probability of success as supervisors, are components of a much broader assessment. In addition to a computer simulation, TLRS comprises a face-to-face simulation, which plays out similar scenarios to those from the computer simulation, as well as career development plans and interview questions for prospective supervisors. To determine whether a prospective supervisor possesses the ability to accomplish these goals, the simulation presents nine scenarios that correspond to circumstances that team leaders are likely to encounter. The introduction points out that the simulation will evaluate how well prospective supervisors demonstrate the following skills and traits: coaching, building relationships, solving problems, team building, decisiveness and analytical thinking. These are more than mere words; upon completing a simulation, a prospective supervisor receives a report that ranks him or her with regard to these traits. The ranking reflects a scale that Employment Technologies has developed rather than a relative ranking based on how one's colleagues within the same organization performed during the simulation. One noteworthy concept that the simulation implicitly conveys is that agents have developmental needs, and that to enable an agent to perform as best as possible, a supervisor has to recognize and act on these needs. What's admirable about Team Leader Readiness Simulation is that it extends the concept of development from agents to supervisors. The assessment is constructive in offering potential leaders guidance on how to build their supervisory skills. 407-865-6644, www.etc-easy.com
Call Center's Keith Dawson sat down with Employment Technologies' Joe LaTorre at Call Center Demo recently for a demo of how the simulator works — see the whole video at: http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/ccf05/etc/default.htm. |