Do you need to improve call center performance? You’re not alone!
Keeping up with customer expectations is the #1 service challenge, according to a 2019 Customer Service Trends report by Salesforce. The same report reveals that 4 out of 5 customers say their experience is as important as products.
So, how do you meet the needs of today’s customers when they are more innovative, more skeptical, and have higher expectations than ever before?
Call center training can ensure that you provide your customers with the experience they expect and deserve. The good news is that your employees want training. According to long-term research from Middlesex University, 74% of workers feel they aren’t achieving their full potential at work due to a lack of development opportunities.
When you offer high-quality training, you can:
The question is: how do you provide call center training that works?
Below is a list of 16 quick call center training tips that you can start using immediately to boost your call center performance, improve the customer experience, and develop exceptional quality assurance.
Comment on, congratulate or formally recognize your call center agents when they perform well. Gallup studies reveal that employee recognition is critical to influencing employee engagement and organizational performance.
Recognition, when visible to other employees, is a call center training best practice that will boost your agents’ performance. It is also likely to motivate all of your employees to replicate their celebrated colleague's behavior.
Just make sure you recognize top-performing employees promptly. Don’t wait to motivate employees on a quarterly or annual basis. Recognize good work immediately and often.
We’re not talking about the fitness type of cross-training! Cross-training involves taking the agent out of their usual environment of answering customer calls or emails, etc., and training them on other business sides that are impacted by customer service.
According to a 2018 academic research paper, cross-training is among the most effective methods of improving individual and team performance while driving employee efficiency.
Moving your call center agents to a different department or team every few months will upskill them, but it will also help boost morale. Doing well prevents agents from falling into the trap of tedious, repetitive work. Cross-training gives agents a chance to learn more about your business as a whole, and it can be an excellent opportunity for them to progress in their careers. Just be sure the cross-training skills your agents gain are transferable!
According to a 2020 LinkedIn report, 49% of learners admit that they don’t have enough time to learn at work. At the same time, 94% said they see the career benefits of making time to learn.
It cannot be easy to justify more time for learning at work because people have a full schedule and many tasks need attention. But it’s worth it. There’s a significant return on investment for spending just an additional 15 minutes per week conducting call center training.
And if you’re struggling to provide more training time, consider cutting time from activities that don't add as much value. The truth is that if your call center coaching tools are practical, performance will improve, as will all other metrics associated with that.
Your agents' performance will improve five-fold if they are given control of their training. Your agents should have access to data about their performance to perform a gap analysis on their skills and identify where and how they can improve. This means empowering your agents through access to performance reviews, agenda-setting, goal-setting, and other items.
One way to do this is with Scorebuddy self-scorecards. Agents can use these cards to give themselves precise feedback on their performance with customers. From there, your management team can work with your agents to set goals for coaching and training, even allowing them to choose the type of rewards they want for meeting milestones.
When you encourage your agents to focus on their strengths and weaknesses, you produce happier and more engaged employees. These employees also end up providing better customer service. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Lack of knowledge and skills is likely a huge problem for your employees. In fact,, 70% of employees report that they don’t have mastery of the skills needed to do their jobs.
However, you have to be careful about designing call center training programs you think your agents need; that will waste time and money. According to McKinsey, only 25% of employees believe that training measurably improves performance.
To avoid falling into this training trap, research the knowledge gaps with quality monitoring and performance review tools. Then, tailor-make training for what's needed. Making assumptions could be a costly mistake!
Only 38% of managers believe their training fits their learner’s needs. And this is especially true when your training only focuses on knowledge gaps and not soft skills. Soft skills are essential to your agents’ success and quality customer experiences.
To train soft agent skills, you must first identify critical customer service soft skills, such as communication, adaptability, initiative, teamwork, empathy, integrity, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence. From there, you need to develop an effective soft skills training plan.
As part of this training plan, you’ll need to hire soft-skills agents and then implement regular soft skills training opportunities and exercises. For example, once you can review customer service calls and role-play the interactions for better results once a month can also make analyzing soft skills an essential element of agent self-combining
The key is to combine engaging soft skills training content with modern technology and a strategic partnership between your leadership team and agents to get the best results. Your company will be rewarded with better call center results, employee retention, and more loyal staff.
Most employees find training uninspiring. They’re easily bored by the content, which is a huge barrier to learning. Instead, you need to develop training programs that are entertaining and informational, which is where gamification can help.
While games might seem trivial, they are an excellent way to foster teamwork, increase engagement, raise energy levels, and encourage skill retention during training. The idea is to reward agents as they reach certain activity levels with badges, performance bonuses, and other benefits.
You can also implement call center training games to build creativity into your learning program. Ideas include:
Mentoring your agents can prove invaluable. A mentor acts as a go-to guide throughout the training process and beyond. They can help demystify complex issues while also offering agents a more in-depth look at what they can expect in the future.
Mentoring is also about real-world value. Mentors become a valuable networking asset for the employee—someone they can leverage for career advancement. In addition, a mentor is one of the best individuals to encourage agents to pick up new skills and try to go to the next level.
And don’t forget the value of reverse mentoring as well. In this scenario, your agents are responsible for teaching others, which is one of the best ways to retain information, expand viewpoints, and gain new skill sets.
Tip 9: Work Alongside Your AgentsIt's incredible how much you can understand a person's role and how they might feel if you walk in their shoes for a day. By sitting next to agents, you'll be better equipped to help and empathize with them and deliver practical call center training tips. In addition, they are more likely to be susceptible to your suggestions.
Regularly sit in on agent calls to listen, see, and feel what they are going through. Then you can provide feedback. Remember, sometimes call center coaching sessions are an avenue for agents to vent their grievances. Often, poor performance is not due to a lack of skill but an overload of frustration.
Working alongside agents will help you understand these day-to-day agitations that can get under anyone's skin. Agents often know the solutions to their problems and don't need a coach to point them out; they need someone to care for and understand the issues.
When training, excellent and lousy benchmark calls are a great way to dissect a conversation, provide call center training techniques, and allow agents to validate their performance. A call monitoring form is critical to this evaluation.
Call center QA forms provide your management team and agents with essential feedback on how well or poorly a customer interaction was handled. This form can then be used to train and motivate agents, identify trends, and reveal areas lacking.
And while every call monitoring form should be customized to your business sector and company priorities, there are four essential areas for training:
According to a survey on how companies could help employees be more successful, most employees (37%) cite recognition as the most crucial method of support. That means feedback can’t only be negative. It is just as important, if not more important, to recognize good work privately and publicly.
Use your judgment to assess to what extent you give both kinds of call center coaching. Competitive high performers might either crave constructive criticism or recognition for excellent work. The last thing you want any call center agents thinking about a call center coaching session is, "What have I done wrong now?"
There are a few keys to balanced feedback:
Connect your feedback to the bigger picture so that your agents understand how their work impacts the company.
According to a Gallup State of the Local Workplace study, actively engaging your employees is key to productivity. To engage your agents, they need to feel like they are valuable members of your call center team. That means you need to give them ways to participate in the decision-making and training processes.
Ask agents to submit their good and bad calls for assessment. Lessons will resonate quicker on their calls, and you'll be amazed at agents' honesty in both knowledge gaps and problem identification.
Self-scoring is also a less threatening way for agents to scrutinize their customer interactions and identify areas for improvement. It empowers your agents to invest in their careers. Just make sure you set clear quality guidelines before allowing agents to self-score so that the results match your goals.
Your agents are individuals. This means that they need individual training to match their personal and professional backgrounds and needs. Regular one-on-one meetings are crucial for call center staff to feel appreciated, connected and cared for. These individual sessions will also help you develop personal, practical, and effective training protocols.
“One-on-ones are one of the most important productivity tools you have as a manager,” writes Elizabeth Grace Saunders, the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching and Training. “They are where you can ask strategic questions such as, are we focused on the right things? And from a rapport point of view, they are how you show employees that you value them and care about them.”
The truth is that call center agents deal with customers every day. It can be tiring, draining, and thankless job. Regular one-to-ones create a more informal environment that focuses on relationships. This is how you foster trust among your team.
Agents are humans with lives outside of the contact center and career aspirations. 54% of employees would spend more time learning if they had specific course recommendations to help them reach their career goals. Personal development is crucial for nurturing any employees.
The reality is that only a small percentage of agents in your call center wants to remain as agents in the long term. When the right learning content is delivered to agents in the right way, and at the right time, they’re more likely to be engaged in your training and spend more time learning.
Try linking training and performance metrics to promotions, increased salary, and opportunities to work in other business areas they are interested in.
60% of agents agree that their company doesn’t always provide the technology they need. A learning management system (LMS) is one of those essential tools for call center training. And it’s precious in a world where 57% of learning and development professionals spend more time online learning than they did three years ago.
An LMS works as a centralized, all-in-one training solution to more easmore efficiently track and achieve your learning goals. It simplifies how you deliver training anywhere and anytime through course management and a blended learning experience. Through its on-demand and dynamic platform, LMS can help you:
Remote call centers aren’t just a new idea for the pandemic. Working remotely has been a trend for a while, and a good reason. According to Snapcomms, “It’s estimated that every staff member who works from home saves the employer $25,000.”
The key is training your remote agents to provide the same high-quality customer service as in the office while improving your ROI. To do this, there are seven critical tips for training remote agents:
Okay, let’s say you’ve implemented all of the call center training tips outlined above. How do you know if it’s working? You need a tool that tells you how well your agents are handling every customer interaction and if they are meeting your performance expectations.
Scorebuddy is an all-in-one call center monitoring platform customizable to your specific needs. You can set it up to track processes, compliance, and how well you’re meeting desired outcomes. You can evaluate calls, review emails, monitor chat, check social media, etc. Scorebuddy even helps you dig deep to identify training gaps, carry out root-cause analysis, and reveal agent successes.
And with Scorebuddy’s new LMS alongside our rich library of curated content inside the Scorebuddy Academy, call center training has never been more accessible. It is the first of its kind, fully integrated contact center quality, customer sentiment, and learning & development suite.
Learn more and request your free trial today.
