One of the most potentially daunting contact center training challenges is in training non-contact center personnel on contact center skills. These are the subject matter experts (SMEs) such as accountants, engineers, healthcare professionals, logistics specialists, programmers and senior IT staff. They are now handling customer service and support inquiries through contacts transferred to them by first line agents, who see their presence via unified communications. They are also directly engaging with customers by responding to their social media posts and tweets.

Having SMEs engaged improves customer service and satisfaction: customers get help from the best personnel available. It also reduces costs through shortening total interactions while focusing the enterprise on “job 1” which is to satisfy, and in doing so retain the customers and attract new ones, without whom there is no enterprise—or jobs. At the same time, having SMEs engaged with customers can detect and solve product and service issues that have lead to these contacts; no one reaches out to contact centers because they are happy. Their corporate status, which is usually higher than that for the contact center staff, could help lead to answers for these matters.

Here’s why training SMEs is daunting. While these individuals are very highly skilled and experienced in their professions, they can also very busy and at times they can be abrupt, lack empathy and patience, and be occasionally gruff. They often speak in the jargon of their fields which customers may not understand and groan, usually inwardly, when asked to “translate.” And in most cases they were not screened and shortlisted for their customer service skills.

“The technology side of presence is the easy part,” Ross Daniels, director of marketing, Cisco (News - Alert), told Customer Interaction Solutions magazine in 2009. “Then there is HR and management side: educating employees on the importance of customer satisfaction to the enterprise and to their careers to get their buy-in, compensation changes and people-skills training.”

Nina Kawalek, CEO the RCCSP Professional Education Alliance points out that most IT jobs require technical expertise, logic, and attention to detail; empathy is not a critical requirement of that work. Engineers have high math and problem-solving skills, with virtually no communications requirements.  Accounting is all about communicating, but not of an oral or interpersonal nature; clarity, brevity and accuracy are key. She recommends that SMEs be screened for customer service skills and have only those that possess such skills be contacted by agents or have customers’ contacts escalated to their desks.

(Yes those individuals are known to exist. I’ve worked with some engineers—who are overall notorious for being “inhuman”—whose people-skills outclass many of those I’ve met who have worked in customer service and whom I’ve dealt with over the phone.)

“Companies need to be realistic about ‘assigning’ call center duties to analytically-minded professionals whose fortes may not be those shared by contact center agents, such as dealing with difficult personalities or handling complaints,” says Kawalek.

This is where having well-trained and certified contact center managers comes in, and why it is very helpful to send those who supervise SMEs that are now interfacing with customers to contact center training and certification classes. By educating these management professionals on best-in-class customer service and coaching skills they can then devise and conduct successful training sessions for their SMEs that have those skills to build and develop them. By effectively listening to customers, asking the right questions SMEs can not only solve the issues customers are calling about but they can also get the root problems that they are trained to solve.

The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance has a wide range of contact center training and certification courses. They are taught by highly experienced instructors in attendee-convenient choices of venues offsite, virtually and optionally onsite. Click here or call 708-246-0320 for more information on the classes offered.