Using E-learning To Educate Call Center Agents
By Arjun Raman,
eWebUniversity
The ubiquitous nature of the Internet has allowed e-learning to transform
the face of corporate training. Corporations have begun embracing e-learning
to reduce training costs that result from high travel bills and the loss of
productivity time of employees. Perhaps even more important, e-learning
allows companies to provide to their employees training modules that can be
completed while on the job. E-learning helps companies extend the breadth of
training subjects that can be offered to employees, as the old-fashioned
classroom method of training was by its very nature limiting in terms of
time and space. The improvements inherent in e-learning are due to the
economies of scale gained by offering training modules over the Internet and
the lower prices of self-paced and instructor-led content that are offered
by e-learning. Most affected by e-learning are businesses focused on
providing service. Businesses that must provide a consistent, pleasing
experience to end users need to transform their workforce into a motivated
army of professionals.
Call center staff are subjected to a high level of repetition in their
jobs as their workday typically includes handling calls that are largely
similar in nature. Furthermore, most call centers do not provide much aid in
professional growth for support agents, which has been, at least in the
recent past, a major contributing factor in unleashing a high level of staff
attrition.
Call center professionals are subjected to specialized training to handle
customer inquiries. Much of this training is handled in large, face-to-face
seminars in which the call centers must procure knowledge experts to conduct
the sessions. Typically, call centers must bear significant costs in
training to ensure their entire staff is well versed in the technologies,
applications or services they support. Moreover, the staff need constant
retraining to keep their skills up-to-date with evolving products or feature
sets. The entire staff is also required to be at the same level of
proficiency, which is a difficult task to accomplish for call centers
without the adaptation of appropriate e-learning tools. With constant
attrition plaguing the call center industry, businesses need to adapt to
maintain a lower cost basis for their operations, while providing the same
level of quality to their end customers, and continuously train and retrain
new or existing employees. Much of the adaptation to survive, remain
profitable and provide cost-effective support services to their partners
requires call centers to locate their operations and support staff in
geographic locations that have relatively lower costs of living.
Call centers can be spread throughout different time zones, states or
even different countries. One recent trend has been for large multinational
companies to create infrastructure in regions of the world where spoken
English and literacy rates are high. These are often places where companies
can save money by leveraging the lower costs of living and em-ploy workers
at lower wages. Geographical locations bring their own set of hurdles for
call center businesses. With new geographical regions come different
cultural backgrounds and communication skills. To make a call center
successful, all agents must obtain the same communication skills and accents
to ensure that end customers receive a uniform experience. To overcome this
impediment, call centers must provide to employees comprehensive
communications and accent training that is very specific in nature. Due to
its specific nature, this type of training tends to be very expensive.
Most of the problems discussed thus far plague call center businesses
everywhere, regardless of location and area of expertise. A key factor that
contributes to a call center's success is the procurement of people who
have the right training and temperament to be successful support
professionals. Much of this has been done through skills assessment tools
that various e-learning programs provide. Many of the skills assessment
packages gauge a learner's aptitude toward specific skills or grasp of
technologies required to be effective at their jobs. Further, these 'skills-gap
analysis' tools help provide a footing for call centers to outline which
training modules each recruit must complete to become proficient in the
skills or technologies that are required.
Skills-gap analysis tools also optimize training costs, as they provide
accurate recommendations to the learner or the managers on what training
modules or areas of interest an individual should pursue. For example, if an
individual applies to be a support staff engineer at a call center for
Microsoft Office products, the potential employer can gauge his or her
knowledge of the product suite by administering a customized quiz. Many
e-learning packages will provide automated results regarding how much the
call center should expect to pay in training costs to bring the applicant up
to the required skill level.
In addition to specific skills, the applicant may also be required to
obtain 'soft skills.' Soft skills that applicants may need to acquire
include communication skills, accent training or telephone etiquette
training. Most call centers are located in very different geographic regions
of the world from where the end customer is located. To provide the end
customer with the best possible experience, an agent may need to curtail a
foreign accent or may require training to bring him or her up to speed on
the cultural nuances of the prospective customer base. Due to the specific
nature of the training applicants may go through, employers can incur heavy
training costs.
Despite the tremendous employee turnover and high training costs that
call centers must bear to survive, coupled with the tough economic
conditions that persist, call centers must continue to remain profitable.
E-learning can contribute to the overall success of a call center to aid it
in improving its bottom line and overcoming obstacles such as high
training-related costs or high attrition of employees.
Adopting e-learning can also provide the largest return on investment (ROI)
for stakeholders. In the traditional sense, call centers must hold a large
number of training sessions for their support agents to help them remain
abreast of new technologies, processes or advancements to help them assist
end customers more effectively. To provide effective training of support
agents, call centers must bear the costs related to travel and time of not
only the trainers, who are required to travel to locations where the
face-to-face training seminars are held, but also the cost related to the
loss of productivity of the support agents who must leave their workstations
to attend seminars. Post September 11th, travel for training is no longer
considered an attractive option by call centers. The burgeoning e-learning
market has seen numerous companies provide low-cost, self-paced or
instructor-led content that varies in scope from accent reduction training
to teaching agents how to be better managers.
The architecture of today's e-learning systems provides tremendous
flexibility, allowing call centers to quickly set up training environments
and rapidly scale them to offer content in various subject areas to
accommodate a large number of users and course offerings. A typical
e-learning system can consist of up to six elements ' an online classroom,
a virtual lab, learning management systems (LMS), a content management
system (CMS), a skills-gap analysis tool and the training content. The
online classroom and virtual lab allow employees to participate in learning
theory and hands-on practice sessions. The LMS tracks learners' progress
through training curriculum and helps in gauging a learner's competence
level. The blend of the online classroom and virtual lab technologies
provides each learner with ample interaction with peers and mentors, who may
be in different physical locations from one another, for a near face-to-face
training experience.
A large component of a successful e-learning campaign is the successful
adaptation of a content management system (CMS) tool. These tools will
typically include wizards that make content creation by trainers easy and
fast in order to aid them in creating content that is engaging and
interactive for support staff training. Typically, knowledge experts will
use text, audio, video and animations to make content interactive and
promote higher learner retention. It is the CMS tool that helps generate
skills assessment modules that help gauge a learner's competency level.
Through the use of prevailing industry standards such as Shareable
Courseware Object Reference Model Initiative (SCORM), the assessment modules
can link with the skills-gap analysis tools and the LMS that helps track the
overall progress of the learners and helps trainers build customized
training curricula to gain the most optimized e-learning experience.
Examples of content that can be created using the CMS are basic issues such
as how to use a headset, or complex tasks such as database management.
Through industry standards like SCORM and the rise of newer and more
sophisticated versions of the online classrooms, call centers can procure
voice-activated software that can integrate with online classrooms to
provide online training to agents on topics such as accent neutralization
and telephone etiquette. Advances in online classrooms now allow individuals
to be assigned specific exercises for these topics that require them to
record and upload their voices to the platform. The 'virtually located'
instructors can then listen to their learners' voices and comment on how
they should improve their accents or methods.
The main advantage gained by call centers in creating content using CMS
tools is the usability and re-usability of content for training other
members of the support staff. The re-usability of the content helps maintain
lower costs for call centers that experience high employee attrition while
maintaining the level of quality for training of all employees. Furthermore,
all content that is created using CMS tools can be continuously edited and
updated to keep the content in line with changes in product offerings or
features. The content can also be archived and made available 'on demand'
to the support agents in case they are required to revisit it. The end
result is that it helps call center staff maintain the highest level of
quality in supporting end customers.
Arjun Raman is president and CEO of eWebUniversity (www.ewebuniversity.com), an
e-learning software platform and content developer that provides e-learning,
knowledge management and online content to the continuing education, higher
education and corporate markets.
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