New call/contact center professionals and executives who need to know about how contact centers operate will have an excellent opportunity to learn about that in the by taking the Fundamentals track at the RCCSP Professional Education Alliance’s Contact Center Congress that is taking place March 28-April 1 2011 at the Sheraton LaGuardia in New York City.

The track, one of six, includes Understanding Contact Center Fundamentals, Fundamentals of Workforce Management and Call Center Management Certification Boot Camp. Attendees can take one or the other of the first two Fundamentals classes, which lasts two days or instead enroll in the Boot Camp, which spans five days.

The Understanding Contact Center Fundamentals teaches business functions and job roles, how to determine a contact center's mission, the top customer expectations centers should meet, how contact centers and other departments interact and at alternative services they can provide. It explores contact center configurations and business models to consider, from a simple centralized center, to remote agents, home workers, outsourcing and hosted solutions. It outlines which stages of call processing one should measure, track, report, and act on and how to do it, explains service level targets and quality monitoring processes and how to interpret contact center metrics and set realistic, achievable performance targets.

People i.e. the agents are at the core of contact centers. The Understanding Contact Center Fundamentals delves into HR matters. This includes classes on creating and managing a workforce and the center's human resource capacity, why people leave, what it costs, and how to improve agent retention and on the causes of burnout, stress, turnover and agent churn. It looks at continuous quality improvement and how to achieve it. It teaches how to structure center's call handling process, from greeting to closure.

The Fundamentals of Call Center Workforce Management covers applying the principles of workforce management to overcome the daily challenges of forecasting calls, scheduling staff, and managing service levels in call centers/contact centers. It delves into forecasting including a look at data collection and interpretation as well as the recommended techniques used by contact centers. It explains how to calculate the staffing required in a call/contact center to meet service goals, and at the many service and cost tradeoffs involved in staffing decisions. The curriculum goes over how to schedule staff, including the difficulties faced by centers today in matching the workforce to the workload and at best practice options on scheduling the workforce and managing service on a real-time basis.

The Call Center Management Boot Camp is an intensive set of classes that provides the big picture. Attendees will learn much of what the other two courses teach plus how to identify contact center products, returns and contributions to the organization what physically happens to a call, from arrival at the center to resolution and disposition. They will be taught on organizing contact center management activities, responsibilities and impact. These range from investment and capitalization, to resource utilization, efficiency improvements, effectiveness measures, productivity and returns. They will also learn how to create a call center Standard Operating Procedures manual that includes best practices for call handling, documentation and customer service, establish a training budget and training plans for new hire, mentoring and on-going training.

The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance’s Contact Center Congress features five other tracks: on performance optimization, strategic direction, tactical management, technology management and operations and engineering. There are a total of 14 different intensive-learning call center certification and training courses.

The congress’ innovative delivery format includes two-, three-, and four -day courses as well as the five-day Boot Camp. The mix and match format will allow professionals to select those tracks that address their individual training needs.

"We've been in the call center training industry for 15 years; the industry is already served by some wonderful conferences that peak professionals’ interest in areas they would like to explore,” says Nina Kawalek, CEO for RCCSP. “But never has there been a congress of in-depth training courses this comprehensive, not ever.”