Call Center Management Featured Article
Adapting Call Center Training for the 21st Century
Are you still training call center agents the way you did five, 10 or even 20 years ago? Whether we like it or not, customers and their expectations have changed, and so has the infrastructure of the contact center, so some of the seemingly fundamental knowledge of agent training may not even be relevant anymore.
Agents have changed, too. What this means is that outdated methods of agent training may actually be working against your organization. Following are some ways that the call center world is different today, which means that training needs to be different, as well.
Scripts are less relevant nowadays. The world is more complex today, so customers will expect the agents they speak with to have a variety of resources at their disposal. Agents need to be empowered to take all steps necessary (within reason, of course) to make the customer happy. If you’re still forcing agents to read from a script, you’re tying their hands and making it more likely that they’re leaving customers unsatisfied and unable to take the right steps to help them.
People are less civil. While it might be a reflection on our fast-past, highly politicized culture, it’s just reality that some people are ruder, blunter and more abrasive than in the past. This means that agents are much more likely to have to regularly cope with rude customers. Ensure that all agents are trained in how to handle adversarial calls. Also make sure they understand what the boundaries are for having to continue these calls: when they evolve into verbal abuse or threats, agents should have recourse for discontinuing the call. Help them understand these boundaries.
Younger agents crave leadership. While older generations of workers expected less from their managers, agents in the Millennial generation or younger want leadership, guidance and positive reinforcement from managers. They want their jobs to meaningful, and they want opportunities to grow and learn. Ensure your training program includes the kind of mentorship and feedback that encourages younger (and older!) agents to improve their own performance and learn and master new skills. Autocratic order-barking doesn’t work with younger workers (if it ever worked at all).
Tie in customer feedback. One great way to reinforce excellent performance (or improve less-than-stellar performance) is to tie customer feedback into agent performance. When agents can see real-life consequences (either good or bad) for their behavior from actual customers, they’re more likely to take action to improve their performance.
Use technology. There are a variety of call center applications that can help aid you in modern call center training. Speech recognition and analysis, for example, can automate the process of identifying problem areas in agent performance so you know where to focus training in the future.
Edited by Maurice Nagle