Effective Call Center Training
Call centers are a major source of employment in the United States. But managing call centers can be a challenge because of the high turnover rate of the employees--from 25 percent to 50 percent per year, according to Cornell University. The most successful call centers are ones that invest in training their workforce. Not only do these centers have lower turnover, they can better service their customers and achieve higher revenues.
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Significance
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Effective call center training is important in saving costs to businesses in the long term. It costs companies the equivalent of three months to four months of an average worker’s pay to replace one worker, according to Cornell University. Also, customers tend to have higher satisfaction when they deal with well-trained call center employees.
Long-Term Goals
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Call center training programs are getting more sophisticated, with long-term goals in mind. Not only do training programs focus on training new employees, they offer coaching, refresher courses, mentoring and computer learning programs, according to the Customer Management Insight website.
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New Hire vs. Experienced Agent
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One way to tell if your call center training program is effective is to gauge the difference between the rookie and experienced agents, according to the Customer Management Insight website. With effective training, a customer may not be able to tell if he is talking with a new hire or an experienced agent. New hires who finish an effective training program will be confident in knowing what they are supposed to do and how they will carry out their job.
Measure Results
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Another way to tell if your call center training program is effective is to know how to measure the results. You can’t fix the problems if you don’t know what they are. Some training programs measure and identify where agents may be weak on knowledge. When management identifies weaknesses, specific training can occur.
Know Goals
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Management must also be clear in their expectations of their agents during training. Call time, first call resolution and customer satisfaction are all important. The agent, however, must know what is most important to the company in order to be of most use.
Technology
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New technologies can also evolve to help with call center training. One suggestion on the Customer Management Insight website is to provide “niblet learning.” This is when the call center agent, for example, is active on a call and doesn’t know how to answer a question or how to fill out an entry field. If that happens, the agent could click a link that would intuitively know which niblet to provide, which would answer the question.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit Call-Center image by Yvonne Bogdanski from Fotolia.com
