Training At The Desktop: Seven Strategies For Success

By Henry Lach Syntora

The advent of e-learning as a strategy for training call center agents has yielded an efficient and costeffective new toolset for sharpening agents’ knowledge and skills, but it has also raised a series of challenges. What kinds of instruction are best suited for delivery at the desktop? How does online coursework fit into the center’s overall workflow? How can it assist agents who are underperforming?

The answers to questions like these are becoming increasingly important as e-learning gains ground in the contact center world. Managers are turning to elearning systems as an alternative to certain kinds of classroom training in order to cope with a wide array of financial, staffing and logistical pressures. Online training is seen as a way to balance rising agent responsibilities and corporate demands to increase revenue and decrease costs against obstacles such as strained training budgets and the difficulty of scheduling classroom instruction for hundreds of agents across multiple shifts. Benefits such as easier training delivery, significantly lower delivery costs and the ability to individualize training to help resolve the agent’s specific shortcomings are adding to the appeal. With adoption increasing, it’s time to concentrate on how to get the most out of your e-learning system. It is important to first accomplish the following:

1. Match the message to the medium.
E-learning is not a replacement for classroom instruction. Activities such as training new hires, introducing a new CRM system or conducting simulation exercises are still best suited to face-toface sessions with a live instructor. Training at the desktop should be reserved for coursework such as product line or policy changes, cross-training, skill refreshers and individual skill remediation. Sample topics would be a new line of widgets, a new cell phone service plan, collecting on older debts, a new policy on family member inquiries, reducing excessive talk times, handling disgruntled customers, etc.

2. Use bold and varied visuals.
Every e-learning system comes with authoring tools for creating courses. Initially, vendors recommended designing each module or training “burst” with a common look and feel from screen to screen, but managers have discovered that agents need some visual excitement to stay motivated and thereby maximize information retention. The trick is to dress up the text with bold and even startling graphics, including animations, and vary the visuals from slide to slide. This will help keep agents engaged.

3. Integrate, integrate, integrate.
To achieve the best results, the elearning system must seamlessly exchange information with the call center’s performance analytics, quality monitoring and workforce management systems. These integrations will make it possible to tie online course delivery to agents’ performance metrics and quality scores (see #4); simplify efforts to analyze the impact of training on agent productivity (see #7); allow voice and screen captures to be easily repurposed for use in training courses; permit elearning sessions to be easily incorporated into the agent’s schedule; and make it easier to push e-learning content at appropriate times and to enforce time limits on training.

4. Use performance metrics as a trigger.
While e-learning is useful for delivering content that must be learned by all agents, it can also be used as a fix for specific performance deficiencies exhibited by individual agents or groups. Training materials can be dispensed automatically to the underperforming agent as soon as a problem is identified by the performance analytics or quality monitoring system. Training can be activated by a rules engine whenever certain thresholds are reached, such as when an agent exceeds pre-defined idle or talk times, fails to meet sales targets or scores below a given level on quality monitoring. This ability to tie training so closely and immediately to performance enables rapid problem intervention without pulling the agent into a training room. It provides a mechanism for agent selfimprovement, it helps remedy poor work habits before excessive damage is done, and it stretches resources for call centers with insufficient coaching staff.

5. Let your dashboard drive.
If your contact center uses on-screen agent dashboards for displaying key performance indicators, the same dashboard can typically be used to deliver e-learning modules. The agent simply clicks on the module name to launch the course during scheduled training breaks or slow periods; prerequisites can be enforced to ensure that courses are completed in a logical order. The advantage is that the dashboard is always docked on the agent’s screen, ensuring that the training alert won’t get buried in e-mail, and also eliminating the need for the agent to log in to a special Web page. This can help expedite completion of the training activity. The dashboard can also be used to provide nearly instant individual and group test results to agents after they have finished a course.

6. Test regularly and quickly.
One of the beauties of e-learning systems is that tests can be embedded at the end of each course to assess the agent’s understanding of the material. To help maximize learning and ensure that agents have a solid grasp of one group of concepts before proceeding to the next, it is advisable to divide each course into smaller sections and then administer a test after each section. Tests usually should be no longer than 10 questions, both to minimize the time commitment and to keep the agent’s attention.

7. Crunch the numbers.
Test results provide a wealth of information that can improve call center operations. If an agent does poorly, additional e-learning can be provided, or team leads or supervisors can intervene for personal coaching. If a particular question generates too many wrong answers, training managers need to determine whether there is a problem with the course material or the question itself. If performance on the floor does not show improvement after e-learning (a correlation that is easy to make if you have an integrated system that can consolidate performance and e-learning reports into one view), an evaluation is in order to determine how to achieve better results. These guidelines can help e-learning implementations run smoothly and enable contact centers to take full advantage of their e-learning systems. The result is easier training delivery without a disruption in call handling — a savings in training costs — and better trained and informed agents who can translate their newfound skills into increased sales, collections and/or customer service.

Henry Lach is president of Syntora Inc. (http://www.syntora.com), (news - alert) provider of agent productivity software for contact centers. If you are interested in purchasing reprints of this article (in either print or PDF format), please visit Reprint Management Services online at http://www.reprintbuyer.com or contact a representative via e-mail at [email protected] or by phone at 800-290-5460.