Best Practices for Your Contact Center Training

Written by KOVA Corp

As contact centers add more automated capabilities for dealing with minor customer issues, it’s becoming more and more important for your employees to be well-trained. That’s because increasingly, the issues that live contact center employees are dealing with are the more difficult, complex ones.

Customers expect your contact center employee to solve whatever issue they have, quickly and professionally. In order to do that, you’ll need to ensure that your staff is as informed, educated and well-trained as possible.

With that in mind, here are some tips for how to best train your employees and make sure they’re ready for the challenges of customer service.

Define your management chain and your team

Make sure that training includes an introduction, not just to you, but to your team of supervisors and managers. It also doesn’t hurt to include contact information for each supervisor, yourself included.

Letting a new employee know who’s who and how to contact each of them can help establish strong lines of communication. That way, employees will know how to properly address any issues that come up during the training process.

Provide ongoing, constructive evaluation

It’s important to provide feedback and guidance - not just to a new employee, not just after 90 days or annually, but constantly. In a sense, training never stops; there’s always something new to learn. So in that regard, evaluation shouldn’t stop, either.

What are your employees doing well? Where can they find room to improve? How have they improved since your last evaluation? These facts can help you and your employees throughout their tenure.

Let employees know how your company works

Contact centers are unique businesses in the workforce. It’s both a direct and indirect form of customer service, often with certain expectations in terms of production.

It’s important that every employee knows the mechanics of how and why a contact center works. Emphasizing the unique aspects of your business can also serve as a possible incentive to employees who have never worked in a contact center before.

Use your recordings

Every customer hears that their call may be monitored or recorded when they begin a conversation with one of your employees. It’s a vital tool in measuring not just how one particular situation was resolved, but how an employee responds and reacts in general.

Check over your employee recordings for specific instances that you can point out during feedback or evaluation sessions. Specific examples are great ways to get information across.

Offer opportunities for learning by example

Every contact center has employees who have excelled. Why not have them speak to your new hires about how they became successful? Their story might be the inspiration that creates a new first-rate employee at your call-center.

Keep training hands-on

We’ve discussed this before when talking about training millennials, but the fact is that the more any new employee can work with your technology and systems, the better.

Working in any customer-service industry can be unpredictable, and having an employee work through a manual or simulation exercise doesn’t compare to what they can learn from on-the-job training.

Be clear about expectations

What do you want your new employee’s schedule and workload to look like at the end of the training process? Giving a new hire a sense of what you expect of them at the finish line is just as important as on-the-job training.

How else will they know what to aim for if you haven’t shown them?

Remember that individuality is important

If you’re hiring in groups as contact centers often do, it can be tempting to make your training sessions as generic as possible. While group training sessions work well for many skills, you want to make sure you don’t rely too heavily on group instruction. It’s a good idea to include as much individual instruction as is feasible.
By focusing on each new hire individually, you stand a much better chance of getting your policies and procedures to stick.

For more on  training employees effectively, read our post “Emotions and Empathy Training for Your Contact Center Agents.

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