Call Center Quality Training
Every call center, no matter which specific niche they serve, needs to have quality assurance methods and processes in place to ensure a consistent delivery of service within customer service performance guidelines. Training call center operators on the particulars of a company's quality vision and standards is a process that takes time and should be goal-oriented. Because of the high turnover of employees in call centers, the use of a standard method of setting goals and tracking operator performance helps call center companies deliver excellent customer service while motivating employees to address areas for improvement.
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Knowledge Gaps
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Any call center quality assurance policy should continually work to identify and rectify gaps in employee knowledge. According to Faith Legendre, the training director of 1-800-flowers.com, you can find learning gaps in the hiring and interview process by using standard and comparable tests, offering ongoing coaching, and monitoring and reviewing metrics. By closing gaps in knowledge with each individual agent, overall service levels tend to go up. Personalized educational strategies eliminate the need for redundant or unnecessary training.
Ongoing Training
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There are always areas in which an individual call center agent can focus on improvement throughout their career, and they should be supported in doing so with regular informative feedback sessions that go over job performance, goals, metrics and areas for improvements, as well as developing and following up on improvement strategies. The best call center agents are those who have been trained over time, and who are able to capitalize on their strengths while supporting and correcting their weaknesses.
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Training Technology
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Call centers regularly invest in upgrading the tools and technology they use to train teams of people. Some have even experimented with self-guided learning to lower the costs of training new hires and improve the delivery of training standards. As technology gets more sophisticated, there will be more opportunities for call centers to improve their quality training processes to ensure agents at all stages of their careers are given the tools and knowledge necessary to perform their jobs.
Personality Types
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Tom Stanfill, the CEO of Aslan Training & Development, suggests that in addition to recognizing performance differences between operators, managers should also carefully consider an agent's willingness to change. Stanfill supposes that call center agents can be categorized in four ways: independents, detractors, strivers, and achievers. The independents are individuals who achieve only minimum standards and are not likely to want to change, and the detractors are those who are not meeting standards and are resistant to training and intervention. Strivers are not meeting objectives but they seem to want to, and achievers meet and exceed objectives with little or no help. If the goal is to raise overall team service levels, the bulk of a team leader's time should be spent with those most likely to improve their individual performance: the strivers.
Incentives, Training and Quality Assurance
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Call center operation can be simplified to three main areas heavily focused on performance. Call centers use training, incentives, and quality assurance processes to support, encourage, and monitor agent performance and development. According to Sharon Daniels, the CEO of AchieveGlobal, it is extremely important to make sure that outcomes for these three key areas are in alignment. To avoid agent confusion and mixed messages, make sure that these areas do not create unnecessary attention on particular metrics that aren't necessarily important to job performance. For example, if the number one priority of the center is to achieve first call resolution, an incentive for the lowest call time would conflict with that.
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References
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