This training course is designed for support center operations managers and directors.
For contact center management, please visit Contact Center Manager Training and Certification.

Overview

This training course is ideal for operations managers and directors responsible for the strategic leadership, financial stability, operational performance and overall quality of the support organization. The program is designed to provide intense focus on those managerial elements that are highly correlated with world-class support center organizations, and to provide participants with the skills necessary to effectively manage the challenges of the most complex support centers. This training course offers support managers the opportunity to develop and refine their technical support leadership skills.

The four and a half day course provides training on the fundamentals of management most applicable to the support environment including managing customer satisfaction, operations and team performance management, and facilitating a team while managing a dynamic service product.

The training course will be dynamic and interactive, with students frequently working in small groups and presenting findings, results, and real-world examples to the entire class.

What You Will Learn

• Executive skills for leading and inspiring continous change and improvement
• How to construct an intellectual framework that defines the support center's business and directs service product design, development, and delivery
• Techniques for synergistically aligning support center operations and strategy with corporate goals and strategy
• Elements of effective decision-making, empowerment, and delegation
• How to implement customer focus and analyze customer feedback to increase support center value and optimize performance
• Performance systems, metrics, key performance indicators, the Balanced Scorecard and how to correlate this information to produce powerful, predictive decision-making data
• How to define business-driven objectives for training, performance coaching, and career development planning that maximize overall organizational impact
• Hiring, staffing, retention, attrition and performance management techniques that maximizing return on human resource investments
• Tools, methods, and analytical techniques for service engineering and workforce management
• Financial management skills that matter most in the support center environment and underly insightful decision-making
• How to appraise the contribution of the support center.

Who Should Participate

The Support Center Management Certification training program is for managers, directors, and executives responsible for the support center's strategic direction and organizational alignment, service products, operational performance, leadership, financial management, and overall quality and customer satisfaction. Attendees must possess a foundation of basic managerial skills. This training course is intended for experienced managers.  The material presented is intended to fill gaps in the Support Center knowledge foundation of the participant and allow for certification that the manager is competent in the core skills and knowledge required to manage in the support center environment. New support managers with less than one year of experience should consider attending the Support Supervisor Certification training course.

Requirements

The training course begins with a review and quiz on a set of pre-class reading materials. These materials are sent to each participant two weeks prior to the class start date. Participants are strongly encouraged to register at least two weeks in advance to allow time to complete these pre-class assignments. Participants should plan some time in the evenings to prepare for the next day’s learning. There will be individual and group homework assignments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Thursday evening will be spent preparing for the written course examination on Friday.  Please plan for study time outside of class. Each participant is required to bring the pre-class reading materials as well as a laptop with a CD drive and with MS Excel, Word, and PowerPoint installed. These will be used as tools during the training course. All other materials and tools will be provided.

Agenda

Module 1: Executive Leadership and Behavior

• Managerial systems that make up the foundation of an effectively managed support organization.
• The benefits of a values system in a knowledge organization
• How to employ the REM (Resourceful, Evaluative, Maximizing) Model
  • Managing performance issues
  • Managing motivational issues
• Planning for change
• Assessing the impact of change on the support operation
• Assessing the business maturity levels of subordinates

Module 2: Understanding the Service Product

• Service products v.s. tangible products
  • Similarities
  • Differences
• The unique nature of service products
• The nature of support solutions as service products
• Managing for quality in the design, development and delivery of the Knowledge Product
• The open systems view of Customer Support Center Management
• Key differences between support agent solution delivery and customer self-service
• Support organization terms defined
  • Knowledge
  • Service Product

Module 3: Managing Strategically

• How to catagorize support offerings
• Determining the strategic relevance of support offerings
• Communicating support offering categorization and relevance to subordinate support practitioners
• How support offerings contribute to the overall strategies of the organization, and how to communicate these contributions to stakeholders
• Designing service strategies that compliment the company’s product strategies
• Defining and aligning support strategies and operations with corporate strategies

Module 4: Decision Making in the Support Organization

• Production resources of the support center
• How decisions affect the production resources of the support center
• Factors that impact decision-making; how to recognize and assess them
  • Risk
  • Bias
  • Past experience
  • Political environment
• Decision-makers; how to determine who makes what decisions
  • Individual
  • Team
  • Manager
  • Outside entity
• Empowerment in the support organization
  • Defining levels of empowerment for each individual
  • How to change levels of empowerment
• Analyzing the costs and benefits of decisions
  • Centralized decisions
  • Decentralized decisions
• Elements of a sound decision making process
• How to identify and select the best-fit alternative when dealing with multiple criteria
  • Using a multi-criteria decision tool

Module 5: Customer Focus and Satisfaction

• Formulating customer satisfaction survey questions to elicit customer responses of greatest meaning, insight and value to the operation
• Important characteristics of an event survey
• How to avoid the most common event survey pitfalls
• Tools that are useful in analyzing survey data
• The three survey questions that comprise a useful customer loyalty index
• Analyzing case study information
• How to identify process and data anomalies
• Recommending remedial actions

Module 6: Performance Measurement and Metrics

• Characteristics of a good performance system
• Characteristics of a good performance metric
• Determine whether a correlation exists between two metrics
• How to measure the strength and direction of metric correlations
• The four pillars of a Balanced Scorecard system
• Including key performance indicators as part of a Balanced Scorecard system

Module 7: Training and Career Development Plans

• The manager's role in employee training
• Determining exactly what employees need
  • When to employ training
  • When to employ performance coaching
• How to develop objectives for training
• Creation and review of individual training and development plans

Module 8: Hiring for the Support Center

• Developing the selection criteria for an open position
• Steps in the hiring process
• Employing a systematic approach in interviewing

Module 9: Performance Management and Employee Retention

• The role of the manager in employee performance
• Calulating the cost of attrition
• Calulating the cost of performance management
• Balancing the costs of attrition against the costs of performance management
• The Coaching Analysis techniques
• Coaching Analysis in managing performance problems
• How to conduct face-to-face discussions with problem employees

Module 10: Operations Management and Productivity

• Operations analysis tools used to manage the support center operations
• How to conduct a statistical process control analysis of the incoming calls in your support center
• Factoring in learning curve analysis when planning for call center staffing
• Key considerations when scheduling support representatives
• Scheduling support representatives in a demand environment
• Creating a staffing plan
• Using the M/M/s queuing model to determine the required staff for a real time call center

Module 11: Financial Management and Annual Operations Planning

• Basics of support center budgeting and cost variance analysis
  • Actual expense v.s. annual planned expense
  • Calculating YTD and projected expense variances
  • Generating a Going-Rate analysis of an annual expense plan
• Calculating Net Support Profit and Net Support Profit Rate
• Forecasting
  • How to create a linear forecast and an exponential forecast from recent historical data
  • How to determine whether a linear forecast or an exponential forecast is the best fit for your historical data
  • Calculating a seasonality adjustment rate
  • Generating a seasonality rate adjusted linear and exponential forecast
• Measuring the relative value of current and future cash flows
• How to develop a cost-benefit analysis and determine the Net Present Value of a project, future investment, or purchase
• Cost benefit simulation; how to determine the likely outcome distribution of a proposed project

Module 12: The Support Center Value Chain

• Appraising the contributions of the support organization to the overall value chain of the company
• How to enhance value for the customer
  • Managing service product development

Certification

To attain the SCP Support Manager Certification, students will be required to complete a post-class exercise planning document. This exercise is designed to solidify and apply the knowledge acquired in the training course through practical application. Throughout the week, students should be looking for project possibilities. On the last day of class, each student will submit a project description, or plan, for the instructor’s review and approval.

Certification consists of several weighted elements, as follows:

• Pre-class Reading and Quiz - 10%
• Case Study Project - 5%
• Participation - 15%
• Post-class Exercises - Planning Document Completion - 5%
• Last Day Exam - 65%

The exam is administered on the last day in a proctored environment, and consists of 20 essay questions which must be completed within a 3-hour period. Certification candidates'score will be processed and returned within two weeks.  Candidates that do not earn certification on their first attempt have two options to re-test: (1) A second, proctored examination may be scheduled for a $600 retesting fee, or (2) the candidate may retake the entire Support Center Management Certification training course for a $1000 re-training fee.

Successful candidates will receive a Certified Support Manager plaque from the internationally-recognized Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards board, and will have their names and countries of origin published on the Internet (list of Certified Support Managers).  SCP Standard-certified career professionals are recognized and coveted throughout world, serving in internal and external customer support operations of the world's leading software companies, technology organizations, internal IT departments, and consulting firms.

Learn more about Service Capability & Performance Standards-based professional certification

Registration Fees

The per student registration fee for this seminar is $3,995, and includes the seminar, training course materials, a jump drive with Excel spreadsheets and other tools provided in class, and proctored certification exam.

The Support Center Management Training is a 4½-days certification course. It begins at 9:00am on Monday and ends Friday at noon after testing is completed . Travel plans should be made to permit arrival at the training site at least 2 hours prior to the beginning of class. Departure flights should be planned for 2:00pm or later on the day of course completion. Please arrive early the first day to sign in and meet fellow attendees. Virtual class consists of eight 4-hour sessions spread over two weeks.

Dress is business casual.

Register securely online with confidence or please call (708) 246-0320.

Seminar Schedule

Dec 2-5, 9-12, 2024	12:00 PM-4:00 PM ET	Virtual Classroom
Mar 3-6, 10-13, 2025	12:00 PM-4:00 PM ET	Virtual Classroom
Apr 28-May 1, 5-8, 2025	12:00 PM-4:00 PM ET	Virtual Classroom
Jul 14-17, 21-24, 2025	12:00 PM-4:00 PM ET	Virtual Classroom
Sep 15-18, 22-25, 2025	12:00 PM-4:00 PM ET	Virtual Classroom
Dec 1-4, 8-11, 2025	12:00 PM-4:00 PM ET	Virtual Classroom

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