Running a call center is not simply about answering phones.
Every day, you balance competing demands: projecting traffic, scheduling staff, managing technology, satisfying callers, and justifying costs to leadership. One weak link, whether in your hiring practices, your management style, or your customer service delivery, can unravel years of careful work in a matter of months.
Veteran call center expert Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, knows this reality firsthand. In this candid and practical guide, he shares what it actually takes to build and sustain a call center that performs under pressure, retains great people, and earns the loyalty of every caller it serves.
Inside, you will find direct, experience-driven guidance on every major dimension of call center leadership. Learn why adherence, availability, and occupancy are the three metrics that can quietly devastate your profitability, and how to measure them with honesty.
Discover how management style drives turnover far more than pay rates do, and what you can do to become the kind of leader great agents choose to stay for. Understand when to embrace AI, chatbots, and automation, how to build a flexible remote workforce, how to design a customer survey that actually produces useful data, and how to think strategically about whether your call center operates as a cost center or a profit center.
Whether you run a small in-house operation or a distributed team of hundreds, the principles in this book apply directly to your daily challenges. Peter DeHaan writes not from theory but from decades of managing, consulting for, and reporting on call centers across North America.
Each chapter delivers real examples drawn from real operations and closes with clear, actionable steps you can put to work immediately. If you want a call center that retains strong staff, serves callers with excellence, and earns its place as a strategic asset to your organization, this is the book you have been looking for.