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Make Sure Contact Center Agents Have the Training They Need

3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

October 29, 2015

Make Sure Contact Center Agents Have the Training They Need

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

I used to work in a call center. If I stepped into a modern contact center, however, I would scarcely recognize the environment.

That’s because the call center has been transformed by recent digital innovations. These innovations include website chat, text messaging customer service support, social media support, and even video customer service in the case of some forward-thinking businesses such as American Express (News - Alert) and Amazon. Not to mention telecommuting agents, which is now a reality for many contact centers.


Not only is the call center now the contact center, it also is a lot more complex. Managing this complexity and keeping the operation efficient requires employees who both understand the technology and their increasingly diverse job responsibilities.

This is a moving target, too, because technology has not slowed down in the contact center. Employees who have worked the contact center for more than a short duration are likely faced with new tech, new processes, and new demands. This all points to the strong need for good agent training.

Yet, many contact centers fail the test when it comes to meaningful training programs. Far too often, training is a mind-numbing affair where agents are pulled from their desks and made to listen passively while the latest protocols or technology demos are paraded in front of them.

There’s also the issue of training that is too few and far between. Agents forget what is learned, or came aboard after the training sessions were given, and so they don’t get the proper training they need.

Trainers might be well-intentioned, but intentions don’t fix the problem.

That’s why many contact centers turn to third-party contact center support organizations such as BPA Quality for training that does the duty.

BPA Quality, for instance, takes the uncommon approach of involving the whole agent team in a collaborative training environment where standards and metrics are set by the team as a whole. This avoids the talking head issue of simply feeding agents the latest info, and it also leads to better buy-in because agents understand the reasons for the training and feel more a part of the solution.

The contact center is a changing place. Make sure agents are on top of it.




Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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