February 2004

By Scott Shute, etalk Corporation

Ask a contact center manager to name the top five problems in his or her contact center and the manager will almost always mention agent turnover. While there are many reasons for this problem, overall employee dissatisfaction is usually at the top of the list. Managers often complain that training is not sufficient or relevant to their day-to-day interaction with customers.

Ask agents what makes them happy and they will say feeling valued in their work is a top priority. They want to know the company understands their worth and rewards their contributions.

More and more companies understand they must improve employee satisfaction in order to improve customer satisfaction. According to Bob Furniss, president of Call Center Ideas, 'Employee satisfaction is synonymous with customer satisfaction. Unhappy employees generally equate to a less-than-stellar customer experience.'

Effective communication and recognition are keys to success in contact centers. At the core of this success is the need to constantly train and evaluate agents. From the moment of hire, there is a need to transfer knowledge and motivate an employee to exceed the expectations of the customer. To do this, a marriage of quality evaluation and training excellence is needed. To meet these goals, many companies are turning to a new breed of knowledge transfer by combining their quality initiatives with e-learning programs and systems.

In most companies, traditional classroom training is a key part of the new-hire experience. It is much easier to schedule classroom training with a group of new employees. Companies can hire the staff, plan the training and schedule the classroom to meet the needs of growth or change, but when it comes to follow-up training, the schedule is much harder to design. How do you validate what needs to be trained? How do you schedule dozens, maybe hundreds or even thousands of agents for a 15-minute session on a new process or product?

More and more, companies are turning to e-learning to solve this problem. With the advent of the Internet, companies are able to create e-learning solutions to stream information and video across the contact center and across the entire organization. Agents have access to training, not based on an instructor's schedule, but based on their needs and availability.

E-learning solutions offer many benefits, including costs savings and productivity gains. Solid data indicate that the difference between e-learning and traditional classroom training across applications, content and audiences is that the e-learning approach saves time. Reductions in training time translate to savings in wages earned by employees during training, and savings in opportunity costs.

Organizations realize additional savings through the elimination of travel and instructor-delivery expenses. According to a study by W.R. Hambreht & Co. (Corporate eLearning Exploring a New Frontier, 2000), organizations save between 50 percent and 70 percent by replacing instructor-led training with electronic content delivery (e-learning).

Companies are discovering that e-learning can provide the final step in the contact center agent performance optimization process. Once agent skills and contact center performance gaps have been identified, managers are challenged to enhance agent skills or face repeating the same errors, causing customer attrition and revenue decline. In short, e-learning provides contact centers with the tools to improve agent performance, and ultimately improve quality such that performance problems diminish over time.

The Convergence Of E-learning And Quality Monitoring Within The Contact Center
The first contact center-focused e-learning programs were introduced in mid-1999. These programs essentially took the basic e-learning model and used existing contact center training curriculum to create online courses. While enabling contact center agents to take classes outside the conventional classroom created a more efficient training program, the courses did not leverage the full potential within CRM resources, such as quality monitoring (QM).

'Although generic e-learning packages have value in the contact center, it is only by integrating with QM solutions that real value can be delivered,' said Datamonitor analyst Robin Goad. By integrating e-learning with QM, contact centers can provide coaching solutions that deliver continuous improvement rather than just a simple training solution.

Additionally, by developing integrations with other contact center applications that contain scheduling, contact volume and agent performance data, namely workforce management, automatic call distributors (ACDs) and quality monitoring solutions, e-learning content can be designed specifically with contact center skills in mind and delivered to agents during identified periods of low customer contact volume.

For example, interaction recording (i.e., call recording), according to Datamonitor, allows the contact center to measure agent performance. When combined with other data, such as customer satisfaction surveys, agent skills can be more effectively analyzed and training needs better determined. In response, the contact center can then develop e-learning courses to meet those needs. Additionally, an analysis can be made of agent participation and success in the courses, and through subsequent interaction recording, and the cycle begins again.

The Success Of E-learning
While e-learning programs provide real-time solutions to many companies, there are also some inherent problems with this type of training. The material can often become stale and outdated. Unlike in a classroom where the instructor can validate understanding and acceptance, e-learning success needs to be tracked and monitored to confirm the programs are working.
Recording calls is the first step in understanding if new skills are being implemented across the organization. With screen capture technology, quality analysts can watch the process as they listen to the interactions. If the e-learning program included product training or information transfer, an analyst could then monitor an interaction to validate that an agent is giving out new information. If the training involved system changes, the analyst could then page through the screens the agent used to validate that the new processes are working. Add to this information ACD data and customer satisfaction results and the training manager can create a true picture of what training is needed and if current training is successful.

Through this process, the quality management system really becomes a key component to building an effective e-learning program. There are three key elements QM can accomplish:

' Allow managers to track if the training is relevant. There is a constant need to validate that follow-up training is actually changing behavior in the center. With a QM program, a quality analyst can 'close the loop' back to the training department by providing real-time examples of how employees are using the information. While e-learning modules almost always include some form of testing, QM can track the success by focusing on specific call types to validate success.
' Allow managers to track participation. QM reporting systems can track e-learning success across the enterprise. With the right information, managers can understand in what order agents should receive information. They can track how scores are affected based on tenure and participation.
' Enable managers to schedule specific e-learning sessions based on specific needs. With Web-accessible programs, the manager can direct an employee to a specific link for a specific need. If the issue is soft-skills, the agent can take a module on improving customer service skills. If the issue is product related, the manager can point the agent to a module on specific product information. The manager can then schedule follow-up monitoring sessions to validate that the training was successful.

E-learning Provides Specific Solutions Within The Contact Center
E-learning solutions allow companies to deliver Web-based learning directly to an agent's desktop in a non-disruptive manner. Using the contact center's own communications system, e-learning training can be done during downtimes ' making agents more productive and available for peak business cycles.

When created with the contact center in mind, e-learning can be designed using a recurrent learning methodology ' creating short, repetitive 'learning breaks' to capitalize on the way the human mind retains information. As a result, agents remember more of what they have learned and are able to more efficiently handle customer inquiries. When e-learning is combined with QM programs, the contact center can validate implementation and productivity gains, such as decreased talk time and overall efficiency.

By focusing on specific contact center needs, e-learning can provide customer contact center agents with relevant, easily accessible information, which reduces 'information overload' and improves contact center proficiency. With a customized Web-based system, it enables customer contact centers around the world to conduct efficient and effective ongoing training of contact center employees. Additionally, it makes agent learning more effective by complementing existing training programs and encouraging professional growth. It is also more accessible since content can be delivered directly to the agent desktop, which means that training courses can be taken anytime from anywhere.

Authoring tools provided in effective e-learning solutions allow training designers to easily import data, presentations, video, flash and quizzes into their courses. Training developers can also import existing content from their training course library and curriculum developers can use a Web interface to assign courses to groups or individuals, to organize agents by type and to schedule effective learning from a single/central location. By combining this with QM, the trainer can 'close the loop' to validate that the training is effective.

Conclusions On E-learning And Quality Within The Contact Center
E-learning is convenient for employees. Employees view lessons that are highly specific to their needs, very interactive and are delivered right to the desktop. They can learn whenever they want and 'learn by doing.' They can practice, play, be entertained and learn all at the same time. QM provides information to the management team to allow for reward and recognition when the agent is successfully implementing the training.

E-learning is good for the customer. Since employees practice new skills before applying them during real contact, the customer doesn't have to bear with them while they struggle through a transaction. QM provides a validation that the changes outlined in the training are actually being received positively by the customer.

E-learning lowers cost and increases productivity. While the potential cost savings of e-learning are highly visible and represent a tangible and compelling argument for it, more important results come as a consequence of the training. The collective experience with deployment of e-learning training is that it is not only faster than classroom training, it is also better. Participants remember what they learn more accurately and longer (retention) and they are better able to use what they learn to improve their performance (transfer). At the same time, the blending of QM with e-learning will allow the contact center to track the success in real-time.

E-learning optimizes state-of-the-art technology. Late in the last decade, universities pioneered Internet-based distance learning. E-learning builds on this innovation. Just as with university courses, learners can consult with online mentors during training. They can send e-mail to content experts directly from any point in the modules and can search Intranets for answers to frequently asked questions. Message boards allow learners to post what they have learned, and trainers can use postings to update the training modules. With the convergence of e-learning, QM and contact center reporting, the contact center can take the next step toward understanding the overall customer experience and changing to meet those expectations.

QM allows companies to understand how changes in process or products are affecting the direct interaction with the customer. E-learning carries the company message right to the desktop. The biggest branding challenge companies face is transforming each front-line agent into a communicator of the company brand. Companies use e-learning courseware to bolster a consistent message and standardized methodologies.

E-learning increases employee satisfaction. Companies that involve employees in e-learning report lower attrition rates than those who are trained traditionally. This exciting finding may be attributed to an increased sense of control over and responsibility for learning.

Employee initiative (rather than the intervention of superiors) can launch learning. Front-line agents hate the feeling that a call did not go as well as it should have, and e-learning provides a quick remedy to the pain.

E-learning energizes trainers. Creative trainers have a relatively free hand in exploring the limits of e-learning. They ask, 'How can this quiz be more effective?' 'How can we keep closer tabs on learners' progress?' and 'What kind of support can we provide now?' Paperwork that bogged them down in their previous lives has given way to electronic record keeping. Test scores compile themselves!

E-learning will reach some employees in ways they've never been reached before. Each person learns differently ' in his or her own way, and at his or her own pace. Much of what we learn is filtered through our life experiences ' what we already know. The e-learning modules do not force learners to go through lessons a certain way.

The marriage of QM and e-learning can bridge the gap between need and true implementation. Together they allow the contact center to grow and change as needed ' to ensure that employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction have an equal focus for success.

As president and chief executive officer, Scott Shute is responsible for setting the overall strategic vision for etalk Corporation (www.etalk.com). He has more than 15 years of experience in call center technology and the customer service industry.

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