Another benefit that customers received from our now-extinct world-class call center was employee autonomy and empowerment. It was rare for me to speak with employees from other call centers who were able to make decisions as quickly and freely as we could.
Maybe our supervisors were lazy, but I don't think so (Well, some of them were, but that's another story for another day). For many experienced representatives, referring a problem to a supervisor, unless it was a really meaty one, was uncool. Only new employees needed to talk with their supervisor about everything.
Managment encouraged us to learn their policies and philosophies and then apply them ourselves. If your supervisor made a certain decision in a certain situation, you were empowered to make the same decision in a similar situation, even if it wasn't written down in a policy manual.
Well we didn't actually have policy manuals.
Tim Stay has a great story about what can happen if you empower your reps to help customers.
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