Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Scheduling Contact Center Training in Small Chunks to Improve Memory Retention
Ask any contact center agent what stands between them and doing a great job, and you’ll probably hear that it’s a lack of knowledge and resources required to service customers to a high degree. Agents either lack access to knowledge bases entirely, or they cannot access the information they require quickly during the course of a telephone call. The result is a frustrated customer, a long call and a less-than-fulfilled agent. Training can help ameliorate this knowledge gap, but in a busy contact center, finding time to train agents on an ongoing basis can be very tricky.
Most contact centers train agents by pulling them out of the contact center into a classroom in order to stuff their heads full of as many facts and best practices as possible. There is ample evidence, however, that this inefficient. Not only is it difficult to find the time to organization classroom training, offering too much information at once means very little of it is retained by agents. Instead, breaking training into bite-sized chunks helps agents keep and use it better, according to a recent article by Judy Philbin writing for Business2Community. It’s about how to optimize the human memory.
“Working memory—which sorts, files, and makes sense of new information—has a limited capacity, sometimes called the cognitive load,” wrote Philbin. “When the brain is given too much information to process, the working memory can’t handle it all, and the extraneous material just falls away; it never gets processed or stored in long-term memory.”
Skilled trainers call it “chunking,” or dividing up knowledge into easy to process bits that can be presented to learners over time. In the busy contact center environment, it’s an ideal solution: it helps agents remember better, and it means that training is much easier to fit into a busy call center schedule. Effective contact center scheduling solutions can accommodate these micro-training sessions easily, distributed throughout the day and carefully arranged so that no work groups or skills are left abandoned or poorly covered. This way, the acquisition of knowledge by call center workers can be better related to day-to-day activities.
“Wherever possible, integrate learning into the normal workflow,” wrote Philbin. “Provide regular reviews via email, video, or follow-up gatherings to help reinforce what has been learned.?Utilize praise and constructive correction, and lead by example. Quality follow-up by management will go a long way to help a well-designed training program stay in long-term memory!”
And a quality scheduling solution will ensure that the contact center’s operations aren’t compromised while agents are acquiring the knowledge they need to do a great job.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi