Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center Training Best Practices Aren't One-Size-Fits All
For many employees, a good start is important to set the tone of the worker’s entire employment. In a face-paced and technology-dependent job like the contact center, initial onboarding and training can make or break an employee. A poorly trained employee will feel flustered, confused and under pressure, and may become another turnover statistic.
Call center management should be following best practices when it comes to new employees. The truth is, however, that best practices will likely vary from worker to worker. Some people grasp new information easily and work well under pressure. Others need a little more time and tending to flower, and work best when the pressure is turned down. So how will do you customized your best practices for your new employees?
Match them with peer counselors. One of the most valuable tools to help train a new call center worker is a veteran. Rather than assigning them randomly, take the extra time to match up personalities. Feel free to put gung-ho go-getters with your sharpest veteran employees. For less outgoing workers, a more introverted peer trainer will help. Older workers might benefit from peers who also had to learn computer skills (as opposed to being born with them!)
Customize their training. Some workers might absorb almost all they need from classroom training. Others might be learn-as-they-do workers who need simulations and practice to pick up on skills. If some workers seem flustered after classroom training, set them up for some more practical, hands-on training.
Ask them what they need. No one knows the workers’ needs better than the workers themselves. If new hires are still tentative, ask them what will help them grasp the applications, the hard skills, the soft skills and the procedures better. Do this more often than just during their performance reviews, as workers may be reluctant to bring up their weak spots during a performance review.
Assure them of their value. While you’ve probably already delivered a mission statement to them, it may have sounded like just a jumble of words. All employees, regardless of personality type, needs to know their labor is valued by call center management, according to Micah Solomon writing for Forbes.
“Speaking to a new employee, let them know they’ve been hired for more than their labor,” wrote Solomon. “Customers, and your company, will only get the most out of an employee’s presence at the company if that employee knows to rise to the occasion in creative ways that nobody sitting ‘backstage’ in an office or boardroom could really conceive of.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle