High-quality call center training is essential for a contact center’s success, especially in the present work at home situation. It ensures that a call center can deliver quality customer experience to the customers of their clients. Besides this, there are a number of other benefits of a state-of-the-art call center training. These include:
- Reducing Employee Turnover: 94% of employees would stay with a company that invests in learning.
- Increasing Employee Satisfaction: According a large section of employees, training and development are a company’s most important policy.
- Encouraging Career Growth: Today a large number of employees don’t feel like they’re reaching their full potential, and many of them are looking for career growth opportunities.
- Improving Profit Margins: Companies that invest in training enjoy 24% higher profit margins.
Therefore, it is safe to say that call center training is vital. However, with the coronavirus pandemic looming, call center training, as we know it, is going to change forever.
Before the pandemic, Fusion, like most other call center service providers, used to do in-person training. But thanks to the pandemic, suddenly everything went online to train work at home reps.
Now, in-office training is very different from remote training. Some of the key problems that you may often face as a work at home company are:
- Disconnection
- Delayed communication
- Lack of resources available online
- Too many distractions
- Difficulty monitoring
- Lack of trust among remote agents
While these challenges more or less exist in every work at home situation, they are more prominent in call center training as it can lead to poorly trained agents who deliver a poor customer experience.
How do we resolve the issue?
So, how can a work at home solutions company ensure quality training for remote agents? At Fusion, we use a few tricks to ensure quality training for all our remote agents. These are:
1. Establishing a Learning and Development Strategy
We think that creating a learning and development strategy that will guide all of our efforts is the first step to training remote agents. The idea is to contribute to more than improving productivity; it should also contribute to employability. We want our remote agents to have the knowledge they need to invest in their future and the future of Fusion. And to do so, we take an in-depth look at our business values. It helps us determine the qualities we want in our remote agents and develop our tools, training, and programs based on it.
2. Building Trust with our Work at Home reps
Trust is the key to successful work at home agent training. When your agents feel trusted, then they’ll deliver better performance. Training agents for every possible situation is not possible. But creating a solid work at home strategy and trusting agents to deliver their best can do the trick.
Regular communication makes the remote agents feel like a part of the team; empowering and motivating them, engaging with them, and asking feedback from them might do the trick.
3. Hold Team and Individual Communications Calls
Making communication a priority is key to train work at home agents. Therefore we regularly conduct one-on-one and group meetings with the new agents via video calling apps. Video tools such as Skype, Zoom, or Google Team allow us to provide good training even in a work at home situation.
We also encourage trainers to record such training calls and make them available to agents for future reference or as a tool for self-learning.
4. Conduct Virtual Classroom Sessions
When we onboard a handful of new employees at once or conduct a regular training session, we conduct a virtual classroom session, which is ideal for sharing knowledge and information, cost-effectively resolving common issues, improving knowledge retention, and increasing productivity.
An interactive virtual classroom session with a skilled trainer, along with self-assessment, course material, and follow-up materials, has proven to be one of the most effective training we have conducted in the present situation.
5. Create eLearning Content for Self-learning
At Fusion, we believe that remote call center training should be available 24/7. That is why we give our agents access to our knowledgebase, available through our proprietary employee management system – FEMS. We have different types of content in the knowledge base ranging from video lessons to online tests, documents, podcasts, technical modules, and more.
Through the knowledge base, we educate our agents on:
- Systems and Processes
- Products and Services
- Legal, Compliance, and Standards
- Soft Skills
- Technical Skills
6. Providing Remote Training Tools
At Fusion, we provide our agents with the technology and tools they need to address their challenges while assisting customers. These include:
- Remote Collaboration Tools like Zoom and Google Drive
- Productivity Tracking tool, a proprietary tool named EfficiencyX
- Quality Assurance Monitoring and feedback, which is available in real-time through FEMS, fostering self-learning.
These tools help us deliver the best possible training in the present work at home scenario. As a call center solution provider with work at home capability, Fusion has quickly adapted to the new normal situation. We have quickly adapted the training and operational process to suit the work at home situation and have responded to the challenge with determination, dedication, and hard work.
