Nowadays, customer expectations continue to change. Recent surveys show that customers expect a lot more than just answers to their questions. They desire personal interaction with skilled agents and need their problems solved asap. Therefore, call centers should invest a lot of time, effort, and money into developing agent training programs.
This is necessary to ensure call centers are well-prepared to meet the ever increasing expectations of customers. This means that call center agent training is a must. Ensure you agents get training from experts so that they can meet needs of customers.
Tips
Guide them to improvement
To create a continual progress for the agent’s performance, you need to offer guidance on various areas that need improvement. In this case, you can utilize several tools such as call recording or live call monitoring to get a good understanding of what agents are saying to the customers. Carry out quality assurance evaluations and offer the agents the feedback they require.
Moreover, you should coach your supervisors. A recent study showed that 80% of call center agents believed that their supervisors did not have required skills to teach them. Therefore, if you want an effective call center, there is a need to devote some time and coach your supervisors.
Link to key performance indicators
Ensure that the call center agent training targets your key performance indicators. This will help you to see the trends, which highlight opportunities for improvement and problems. You can use them as criteria to develop your training programs.
Turn agent’s training into actions
No matter t
he energy and time you devote to creating a perfect training program, sometimes it can fall on deaf ears. Thus, you should ensure that all topics discussed during the training are converted into actions.
It is advisable to break the session into few vital activities. You should take your time to see how agents are applying their newly acquired knowledge.
Training consistency
The call center agent training program, which lacks consistency and structure can end up causing a lot of harm than good. Therefore, the training process should be defined before implementation. In fact, the majority of the supervisors surveyed are unable to outline objectives of their training program. You can achieve consistency by coming up with metrics and standards that translate into processes that can be implemented. In this way, all your call center agents will experience the same form of training and handle customers.
