Call Center Management Featured Article
Training Tips: Sharing Knowledge in the Contact Center
When it comes to call center training, what’s your most valuable resource? Is it your e-learning software? Your years-old classroom training curriculum? Your training videos? It’s probably none of the above. Your most valuable training resources are your top performers in whose heads the learning process resides.
As with most organizations, call centers are going to have top performers, middling performers and some stragglers. While this is inevitable, it’s important that the distance between the call center’s high achievers and its weakest links doesn’t get too great, according to a recent article published by Harvard Business School. Instead, use your top performers to update your training and tap them for ideas based on what helped them become high achievers.
“When you are exposed to different ideas or a different way of working, it can change your own behavior,” said Christopher Stanton, the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.
Why This Approach Needs Nurturing
You may be thinking, “Isn’t it enough to simply have the top performers in the call center to emulate?” No, it’s not. For starters, knowledge doesn’t pass by osmosis. It needs call center management to create an organized framework so it can be shared. Secondly, your stragglers and underperformers may not realize that they ARE struggling, or they may not know how to approach the more experienced agents for help. Not everyone is an outgoing personality, and admitting you need help in a professional setting is hard.
Stanton recommends that call center management break agents up into pairs: one a top performer, and one who needs a bit more help. You can organize the pairs in a way you think will create the most synergy. Before you begin, have all your agents identify some of their strengths and weaknesses, and use this information, plus your own judgement, to make the pairs. The goal is to build conduits toward sharing knowledge by breaking down barriers between agents.
In a trial process Stanton and colleagues described in a research paper, in addition to breaking into pairs to analyze their own performance, the pairs of employees received a financial bonus based on their combined performance to incentivize them to help their co-workers succeed. Ultimately, the performance analysis approach increased revenue-per-call by 24 percent, while the monetary incentives increased it by 13 percent. When performance was measured five months later, however, the structured meeting group continued to operate at higher performance levels, while the financial incentive group had returned to previous performance levels.
Edited by Maurice Nagle