If you’re anything like me, then you’re gearing up for one of America’s most beloved and classic sports starting soon – baseball. Now that the Super Bowl is officially over, the pounds have been packed on from an abundance of snacks and the power has been restored at the Superdome, many loyal fans have turned their eyes to the beginning of the season – spring training. For you non-baseball aficionados, in Major League Baseball (MLB (News - Alert)), this is a time for teams to engage in a series of practices and testing games, as well as a time to welcome new players and have them acclimate to the environment. Spring is a time of new beginnings and success, and so why not translate this concept to your call center agents?

The two are very similar when you stop to think about it – each welcomes new team members quite regularly who need to step up to the plate to prove themselves. While one is in the form of knocking balls out of the park, the other is in the form of leaving customers completely satisfied to increase revenue and overall efficiency.

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Despite New England getting a few feet of snow this past weekend with snowstorm Nemo, good old “Punxsutawney Phil” did in fact predict an early 2013 spring. If this little critter is right, then we’ll be seeing spring sooner than we think! In light of this, here are some handy tips to keep some of the most important aspects of your call center operations up to speed – all courtesy of the Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals LLC (RCCSP), a top provider of call center training solutions.

Always find new and innovative ways to motivate your employees: To achieve first-rate service and results, call center managers need to take care of those who are keeping their services successful – their agents. The best way to do this is with some good old fashioned motivation. “The end result to top-notch project management is understanding the best ways to go about proposing a new project, qualifying and quantifying it and ensuring organization buy-in. Good project managers also understand how to motivate their employees and teams and how to set and measure goals,” TMCnet reported last month. In light of this, RCCSP has also made available a project training course that sheds light on this and the below point as well.

Take a hands-on approach: This provides individuals with the best opportunity to acquire skills that otherwise would take months to master, writes TMCnet’s Tracey Schelmetic in a report. “These skills include learning the definitions and terminology of project management as well as the project management lifestyle, building a business case for project initiation, defining project scope and stakeholder expectations as well as project management roles, ensuring company and executive buy-in and identifying, analyzing, quantifying, mitigating and managing risks.”

Create a world-class support organization: If you’re not prepared to implement newer concepts in your call center, then you better be ready to soon. Such concepts as ‘balanced scoreboards’ and “[understanding] how to use this information to produce powerful, predictive decision-making data” are some that Schelmetic adds in another related report from December of 2012. RCCSP also offered a Support Management and Training course “designed for operations managers and directors responsible for the management, financial stability, operational performance and overall quality of the support organization,” which will ultimately help participants get a better grip on the necessary management skills to support an ever-evolving call center environment.

When considering the following points, it should be both fun and easy to ramp up your call center spring training this year.

To learn more about innovative call center training solutions, visit the RCCSP’s website by clicking here.