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    Call Center Training Software: The Guide

    Practical employee training is one of the more essential long-term investments you can make in your company. It is vital to your growth strategy and your company’s future success. That’s because training is how you help your employees reach their full potential, meet your goals, and provide customers with the experience they expect.

    Unfortunately, many companies do not dedicate enough time or energy to training. They focus on one-time onboarding, and then, after that, they provide just six to 12 minutes of training every six months. This means that employees aren’t receiving the training they deserve or want—74% of employees feel that they are not achieving their full potential at work due to a lack of development opportunities.

    The good news is that call center training software can help you overcome barriers to training and implement a training program that is easy to use and successful.

    What is Call Center Training Software?

    Call center QA software includes software tools and content that assist you with training your employees. Whether a complete learning management system (LMS) or a more simplified program, the tool should help you organize an online, in-person, or blended training program to manage, track, and achieve your learning goals.

    There should be the ability to develop and manage courses, assign users, streamline attendance and delivery, and scale training to meet the organization's needs. When implemented effectively, call center training software should provide your company with the resources and insight needed to deliver training anywhere and at any time.

    Deliver cost effective training

    Home Grown Training Tools VS a Learning Management System (LMS)

    The key to call center training software is choosing the right type of learning system for your needs.

    Currently, many companies try to survive with homegrown spreadsheets. But while spreadsheets can help keep records of training, they are not scalable, offer no progress tracking, and require expensive and rigorous manual work. A spreadsheet provides no way to easily and quickly organize content, automate training activity, or review results. It is less of an all-in-one training solution and more of a manual record.

    On the other hand, a learning management system (LMS) is an all-in-one training solution. It saves you time by automating much of the training process. You can quickly create and manage courses (using SCORM 1.2 and xAPI files), add LIVE courses, track attendance, assess knowledge (through exams), reward learners, and seamlessly integrate training into your other software systems with the click of a button.

    Training by Spreadsheet

    Learning Management System [LMS]

    ·  Not scalable

    ·  No progress tracking

    ·  Poor organization ability

    ·  Expensive and rigorous manual work

    ·  Easily scalable

    ·  Automated course and user management

    ·  Blended learning options

    ·  Track, record, and analyze training progress

    ·  Integrates with other call center software

     

    Common LMS Features of Call Center Training Software

    The goal of call center training software (like an LMS) is to provide a centralized solution for managing, tracking, and achieving your learning goals. The program should partner with you to:

    • Deliver training anywhere and at any time.
    • Identify gaps in training and learning.
    • Create, manage, and deliver a call center training program.
    • Automate and scale training to meet needs.
    • Track, document, and report on practical training.

    So what LMS features do you need to take your call center training program and customer experience to the next level? Here are a few:

    1. Course Management: Your call center training software should offer ease in building, managing, and distributing courses. Look for LMS features that allow you to drag and drop course content into the system and create content in various formats (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Video, Audio, etc.).
    2. User Management: You need to quickly organize users into segments by department, team, role, location, and more. This feature should also allow you to create groups, set users as administrators, managers, instructors, or learners, and delegate tasks accordingly.
    3. Intuitive Interface: Your call center training software should be user-friendly with an intuitive interface that works with popular authoring tools such as Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and Elucidate. You should also be able to upload SCORM and xAPI files.
    4. Blended Learning Options: eLearning should not be the only type of training available in your LMS. You should also be able to schedule and add LIVE training sessions for instructor-led learning across multiple time zones.
    5. Learning Environments: There should be the ability to create a different learning portal that’s customizable for each audience type. And those environments should allow for sharing courses, audience management, and group conversations within forums, discussion boards, and topics.
    6. Gamification: To keep learners engaged, a key LMS feature is the ability to gamify the training experience through goals and milestones while recognizing learner achievements. Look for the ability to award badges and points and highlight top performers on leader boards.
    7. Exams: Your call center training software should allow you to test learners and gain performance metrics via exams automatically. There should also be multiple question types, including multiple-choice, true or false, and fill-in-the-blank.
    8. Reporting: Fully functional reports are critical for tracking your company’s training progress and user progression. You should have the ability to apply data filters to customize your reports and automate the daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
    9. Integration Abilities: Your training software should integrate with other popular tools within your call center to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate training. Look for integration with webinar tools, HR systems, task management tools, customer service tools, social media, CRM, and Payment gateways.
    10. Learner Feedback: The system should allow you to gain insightful learning feedback through surveys about the course experience and trainers.
    11. Mobile-Friendly Capabilities: The software should be mobile-friendly so that learners can train anywhere and at any time with an on-the-go learning app that functions just like the desktop environment.
    12. Branding and White-Labeling: Your call center LMS should reflect your business by being configurable with your logo, colors, images, and custom URLs.
    13. Language Support: For global call centers, the LMS should offer training in multiple languages, including English, French, Chinese, German, and Spanish.

    Scorebuddy BI: a fully featured learning management system

    10 Benefits of Using Software for Your Call Center Training Program

    Creating an effective call center training program can be a cumbersome task. However, it’s an essential one that can be made more accessible by using call center training software. With software, you can automate much of the training process, improving how you teach compliance, customer engagement, soft agent skills, and performance.

    A call center LMS offers a vast online environment for on-demand and instructor-led education when used correctly; call center LMS provides an enormous online environment for on-demand and instructor-led education.

    1. Centralized Automated Training Solution

    The software for your call center training program should be an all-in-one solution. The system's goal should be to automate the process of training and eliminate repetitive administrative tasks. It should help you quickly and easily assign learning to a large number of individuals at once to support productivity, retention, and growth.

    The software solution should also go above-and-beyond traditional training to offer a more user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and guided training experience. And with all the features outlined above, it should help you save time, streamline, and manage all aspects of your training program without technical expertise.

    2. Anywhere and Any Time Training

    Virtual training is essential whether you have a remote call center or your employees occasionally work outside the office remote call center, virtual training is necessary. You need a way to overcome disconnection, delayed communication, and a lack of resources to provide an exceptional learning experience.

    The software can help you create an effective virtual classroom (on desktop, tablet, and mobile) to quickly and efficiently disseminate training. You can divide learners into groups or individuals and deliver cost-effective learning anywhere and at any time through videos, online tests, downloads, podcasts, games, and more.

    3. Efficient and Effective Employee Onboarding

    Only 12% of employees feel that their organization does a great job onboarding. With call center training software, it’s easier than ever to create formal and informal employee onboarding. New hires will receive simplified training focused on the skills, knowledge, and resources needed to shine in their roles.

    The software can automatically add and enroll the new hires into onboarding when they are entered into the CRM. From there, the new employee will be automatically assigned learning paths, courses, and milestones. You can even set notifications to remind new hires when it is time to learn.

    4. Highly Specific Training per Employee

    The global workplace training industry is worth $370.3 billion. Unfortunately, much of that money is invested in ineffective learning, outdated materials, and non-specific learning goals. But with a call center training program, you can identify the critical needs of each employee and design courses that precisely meet those needs.

    Within a call center LMS, each employee is set as a separate “user,” which means they can be assigned specific courses and training sessions designed for their development. And with the ability to track each employee’s progression via exams, surveys, and training histories, you can quickly and easily adjust learning to be more personalized and effective.

    5. Training Based on Learning Gaps

    Call center training programs often throw everything at agents at once. This can leave agents feeling overwhelmed. The software helps you create a more well-rounded training program that is more directly related to your organization’s goals, resources, individual needs, and customer experience.

    An LMS can help you identify gaps in agent knowledge through periodic performance reviews, exams, and assessments. You can even ask your employees to identify the knowledge gaps and skills they’d most like to learn through surveys. And from there, you can develop new and practical training that fills in those gaps with product and service knowledge, soft skills training, and more.

    6. More Engaged Employees with Less Turnover

    According to 68% of workers, training and development are essential to their success and happiness. They feel that learning gives them a competitive advantage and increases their productivity. It also helps them feel more engaged in their work, which means for 94% of employees, it helps them stay at a company longer.

    Call center training software offers employees an easy-to-use platform for engaging in learning. It encourages them to spend their time training by creating learning paths that guide their experience engagingly. And the best systems offer both mandatory and self-directed learning so employees can take courses when they are most motivated to learn.

    7. Nurture Learning Through One-on-One Engagement and Gamification

    As for nurturing the desire to learn, one of the most effective call center LMS features is the ability to gamify learning. This offers learning and development teams the ability to set clear goals and milestones and recognize achievements, increasing overall employee engagement.

    A customer service LMS allows you to add gaming mechanics to the learning process. Along each step in the training program, you can reward learners with badges and points and even highlight top performers and award prizes on a call center dashboard. In this way, you continuously promote agent improvements by making learning fun, engaging, and agent-focused.

    8. Increased Customer Satisfaction

    If you want happy customers, you need well-trained employees. Call center staff trained using an LMS are more likely to develop and perfect their customer service skills. They’ll be trained above-and-beyond onboarding to continually develop experience assisting customers, demonstrating empathy, and handling customer complaints.

    Call center training software allows agents to practice interactions and gain immediate feedback on their performance. This helps them make progress regarding technical skills and soft skills, processes, products, services, and compliance. And since they can learn at their speed, they can learn not just to meet but exceed customer expectations.

    9. Track Training Progress and Effectiveness with QA Metrics

    Without an LMS, it isn’t easy to track the effectiveness of your call center training program. But with software, you can gain valuable insights and actionable reports about how you’re meeting your learning goals. In fact, you can track, score, analyze, and improve upon all QA metrics, which is critical to exceptional call quality.

    Through automated daily, weekly, and monthly reports, learner surveys, and performance dashboards, you can track training progress. In this way, you can directly measure the impact your training has on your ROI. Then, from there, you can organize further training to improve performance.

    10. Cost-Effective Training

    Delivering and managing call center agent training takes time and energy. However, call center training software eliminates many of the everyday administrative tasks. As an all-in-one solution, your call center LMS can help you create consistent and simplified training that is mainly automated and designed to train and engage many employees at once.

    And because the software makes your call center training program entirely online, it’s effortless to create new material. This means you can spend less money on trainers and materials that lose money over time. And since you can update the learning process at a moment’s notice, you can make your training more cost-effective and fluid.

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    6 Steps for Implementing a Call Center Training Software

    Now that you know why implementing call center training software is essential, how do you get started? There are six steps.

    Step 1: Establish a Call Center Training Programme

    First and foremost, you need a game plan to create your call center training program. This means you need to outline all of the training that needs to occur from the ground up. And be as specific as possible about what needs to be covered and how often that training needs to happen.

    There are three questions you need to answer to get started.

    • What training materials are available? Do you already have training materials for best practices, compliance, processes, and skill-building? What materials do you need to create from scratch, and what can you adapt?
    • What training resources are available? Beyond your training materials, do you have software, data, tools, and mentors in place to implement training?
    • What employee capabilities are essential to success? Identify the soft skills, hard skills, compliance knowledge, and processes vital to your company's success. These are the capabilities you’ll build your call center training program around.

    Step 2: Choose the Right LMS

    Next, you want to choose the suitable LMS to help you efficiently deliver, effectively manage, and accurately measure your call center training program. By implementing an easy-to-use learning management system, you create a single, comprehensive learning platform for your training needs.

    Look for an LMS with all the outlined features and a vast online environment for on-demand and instructor-led training. The system should streamline content creation, attendance, and classroom delivery. It should also have the ability to offer different course types and styles to best suit the individual learner (document, presentation, video, audio, webinar, live training, etc.).

    The LMS should also be highly flexible, allowing you to train based on your agents’ schedules and needs. If it is not a user-friendly and comprehensive learning and development solution, such as Scorebuddy’s LMS, it is not the best system for your needs.

    Step 3: Setup Your LMS for Customer Service Training

    Once you’ve chosen your call center LMS, you need to set it up correctly for efficient and effective call center training. With Scorebuddy’s LMS, this is a simple six-step process.

    1. Upload Coursework: Using SCORM or xAPI files, automatically upload or create courses within your training program
    2. Add Employees (New Hires): Batch upload multiple employees at a time via CSV or manually add new learners.
    3. Assign Roles (Student, Admins, Managers, and Instructors): Assign employee roles based on who needs to be involved in what stage of training.
    4. Automate Enrollments: Set specific criteria for each user role to add those employees to all required courses automatically.
    5. Group Learners: Create groups of learners with tailored content based on their needs.
    6. Set Timelines & Due Dates: Create a training schedule and set time frames and due dates for completion.

    Step 4: Start with Onboarding

    If this is your first time building a call center training program and implementing software, start with what you know: your onboarding program. Instead of trying to jump to delivering ongoing and continuous training immediately, focus on implementing software for your onboarding process.

    Onboarding is essential for job retention and job efficiency, so using software to automate onboarding in your call center to ramp up agents effectively uses your time. It allows you to manage training procedures, look past software functionality, and ask, “does this help solve my problem?” It also helps you add structure and measure return on investment.

    Step 5: Ramp up to Ongoing and Continuous Training

    Employee onboarding is only part of the process in an overall training program. It’s the first step, but you have to create long-term employee education goals. This means you need a way to make interpersonal development a regular part of your agents’ work life. They should have access to an extensive catalog of courses that they can pick and choose from for self-directed learning and instructor-led learning.

    One way to ramp up training is to break down your education goals into steps with timelines. You can create learning paths that employees can enroll in with grouped courses on a specific topic. For example, you can create a sales learning path with three methods:

    • Intro to Sales
    • Sales Enablement
    • Sales Software

    Then, once a user has completed one course or a specific timeframe has passed, they are auto-enrolled in the next course for continual progress.

    Step 6: Measure the Success of Your Call Center Training Program

    You’ll only know if your call center training software is successful if you report, monitor, and improve upon it. Use your software to view reports on how healthy onboarding and ongoing training perform. You’ll want to access details on employee performance to ensure they’re staying up to speed and gaining new knowledge.

    Identify training gaps, confusing and inefficient processes, and employee frustrations. The goal of the software should be to create a frustration-free and user-friendly training environment, so be prepared to make changes as needed.

    And don’t be afraid of asking for employee feedback. It makes your employees feel more valued, but it will help you improve your training processes.

    The Best Call Center Training Software

    Scorebuddy LMS is a single platform solution that offers contact centers the ability to perform QA alongside a fully featured LMS and a rich library of curated content inside the Scorebuddy Academy.

    Our call center training software is easy-to-use and helps contact center managers and quality assurance managers deliver practical and accurate call center training. Users have easy access to training content and curated expert courses to educate and certify their teams.

    Features include:

    • Create your own branded LMS Portal
    • Blended Live and online courses
    • Full Track and Report features
    • Basic Authoring tool
    • Fully SCORM and xAPI compliant
    • Exams and Assessments
    • Learning Paths
    • Gamification

    It’s learning as it should be—in an all-in-one, robust solution. For more information on Scorebuddy LMS™ and Scorebuddy Academy™, visithttps://www.scorebuddyqa.com/learning-and-development

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