Call Center Management Featured Article
Tips to Speed Training of New Agents in the Contact Center
If you had all the time in the world to train new contact center agents, you could afford to go highly in-depth and build innovative training plans that taught hard skills, soft skills and new add-on skills that would help your agents advance. You’d be able to measure your efforts, try new things, mix the lessons up and have some fun, and never put agents onto live calls before they’re ready. Given the reality of the contact center, it’s a lovely fantasy, but probably not possible. There are customers in call queues, schedules, unforeseen events, reports to compile and about a million other tasks to do.
In reality, what you need are some tricks and shortcuts that will help you get agents where they need to be in the shortest amount of time possible. You can’t afford to cut TOO many corners, as the call center is your front line of defense and ideally, you’d prefer not to drive business away. There are some things you can do to safely speed the process, however. These include:
The buddy system. People often learn better in pairs when they can figure things out together. You can do this one of two ways: pair up two new agents with complementary skills (for example, one with good computer skills and another with good people skills). Or, you can pair a new agent with a more established agent to create a mentoring program. Either way, new agents will have some help when they’re first starting out, and the pairing reinforces the lessons learned.
Use simulations. Before you put newbie agents on calls, consider using a contact center training solution that creates simulations – some of them quite intensive – for agents to practice on. You can score the agents on how well they resolved the simulated call and repeat the process until you think they’re ready for live calls.
Use customer feedback. Agents will get a lot out of seeing and understanding how their performance leads to good, bad or indifferent customer feedback. It puts their performance into a real-world context and may help them self-correct behavior that isn’t quite working for the customer or meeting metrics. This is easy to do with a good call center recording solution.
Use gamified solutions. Gamified solutions, in which employees can progress through the levels of their training and earn points and badged (like in a video game) can add some competitive fun to the training process. Most of your new agents are likely young and will relate to the gamified process and respond to a bit of competition.
Lavish praise. An engaged employee is an employee who is willing to learn. Be sure you mark your new agents’ (and veterans’) accomplishments by recognizing them and providing encouragement.
Edited by Maurice Nagle