Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center Management Tips for Training Agents
What’s the most critical process in your contact center? Of course, your ultimate goal is to provide customer service excellence, but how do you achieve that? Monitoring and incentivizing your agents are both critical, but without thorough and ongoing training, they won’t be able to provide excellence to begin with. With training, not only can you successfully onboard them through classroom guidance and simulations, but you can also continue their education, adding new skills and helping them stay up to date with call center best practices and your newest products and services. Training has another great benefit: it encourages agents to grow in their jobs, take on new skills and responsibility and even (ultimately) move up to supervisor and management positions.
Following are some best practices and tips for training call center agents.
Train agents on all media. Consider training agents on phones for part of the day, and other contact media such as email or chat for another part of the day. Without variance, training will become boring and repetitive and agents will turn out. The extra bonus is that when training’s over, you’ll have agents who can work on different media.
Vary classroom and practical training. Most people’s attention span for classroom training wanes after too long, so limit the classroom sessions and intersperse them with practical, hands-on training such as simulations.
Have agents role-play. Assign one agent to the part of a customer and another to the part of an agent. This way, not only will agents get practice, but they may develop some empathy for what customers are experiencing.
Celebrate good results. Everyone needs encouragement during training. Use a rewards system to induce trainee agents to try a little harder, and recognize when they’re doing good work. Be sure to give them actionable feedback on their performance.
Train them on difficult calls. Every one of your newbie agents will eventually run into a very difficult call with a customer who is angry, emotional, inappropriate or just plain odd. Teach agents how to deescalate difficult calls, and what steps they can take if callers become abusive or overly emotional.
Monitor and coach their first live calls. When you do finally let agents loose on real customers, do it with a manager listening to the call. Many call monitoring solutions allow managers to “whisper coach” agents through first calls or difficult calls.
Be sure to explain the concepts simply. Not everyone has spent a lot of time in the call center. Practices that may seem routine to veterans may be perplexing to new agents, so be sure you’re defining your terms and basic concepts. Consider creating a “help” or “how to” page on your internal network where agents can look up answers or even help each other.
Edited by Maurice Nagle