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Effective call center agent training can deliver many positive outcomes for a business. Top among them is the impact a high-performing agent can have on the customer experience. Call center agents are often the first company representatives who customers interact with. For that reason alone, providing meaningful call center agent training is a worthwhile investment of a company’s time and resources.
What is the best way to approach call center agent training? In this post, we offer some basic strategies and best practices for shaping your training process so that both new agents and seasoned pros can become more effective in their roles.
Before we look at the key components of call center agent training, let’s consider further why it can be beneficial to focus on up-leveling the technical skills and soft skills of your call center agents through a formalized approach supported by the right technology.
When you think about what call center agents do day in and day out, it only underscores the need for an appropriate training process for these professionals.
Typically, they handle customer inquiries, complaints, and support requests via various channels, including the phone, email, and chat. They provide information, resolve issues, and help businesses to ensure customer satisfaction. Often, they are required to follow scripts and procedures to maintain consistency and quality in customer interactions.
Thus, effective communication, problem-solving abilities, and soft skills like empathy and diplomacy are essential to succeeding as a call center agent. Professionals in these roles, particularly new hires, may have the raw skills to perform well, but to become exceptional agents, those skills need refinement. That’s where training comes in.
Providing your agents in the contact center with relevant training and comprehensive coaching not only equips them with the knowledge and skills they need to deliver standout customer service but also builds their confidence and helps them feel more empowered to handle the stress of their jobs and avoid burnout.
So, call center agent training is not just an investment that can increase the proficiency of your contact center team. It’s a strategic move that can help your business retain talent, thereby reducing costly turnover. And, of course, highly skilled agents are better positioned to provide the level of service your customers expect, which helps you retain them, too.
What types of call center training topics should you include in your training program? The five main components of call center training listed below are a solid starting point.
Call center agents deal with a wide range of customers, many of whom are reaching out because they are feeling disappointed, confused, or downright angry about some aspect of their experience with the business. Agents must therefore always be ready to apply soft skills and understand how to be even-handed and professional in every customer interaction.
For example, being an active listener, which means focusing completely on what the customer is saying and understanding their message, is a vital skill for ensuring a customer feels heard and has a positive customer experience. Some of the keys to active listening include using verbal cues (e.g., “yes” and “got it”) to demonstrate that the agent is paying close attention to the customer. Agents also need to know when and how to ask open-ended questions to help clarify information the caller has conveyed. These tactics can be taught with training.
One of the most complicated aspects of the job for call center agents is being aware of consumer protections and regulations that govern phone interactions between customers and businesses and taking care not to run afoul of them.
For example, in the U.S., there’s the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which restricts contacting customers before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m. unless the customer agrees. Other financial industry regulations call center agents may need to navigate include the following:
There are also privacy protections to know, which can range from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to industry-specific regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects private health information.
There are also rules, which vary by U.S. state, that regulate the monitoring and recording of phone calls, requiring customer consent for calls to be recorded. The national Do Not Call Registry, a free service managed by the Federal Trade Commission designed to give consumers a choice about whether they can be contacted by telemarketers, is another consumer protection measure that agents in the contact center may need to be mindful of, depending on the nature of their roles.
We’ve already touched on the importance of agents using soft skills in customer interactions, but it’s worth emphasizing that effective soft skills make all the difference in your company’s ability to keep customers feeling satisfied.
As we noted in a previous article about how to have effective communication with customers, there are few second chances to get things right in customer service. And research shows that most consumers will stop doing business with a company after just one bad experience.
So, when you are putting together your plan for call center agent training, improving soft skills such as communication, problem-solving, creativity, and empathy, should be a focus for new hires as well as your more experienced team members who can always use a brush-up.
Your call center staff must have strong knowledge of the products or services your business offers, otherwise, they will struggle to be effective in their roles. Much of the time they spend on the phone with customers will likely be devoted to solving problems consumers have with a product or convincing the caller to buy a product.
Agents also need to understand your products and services thoroughly so they can identify and move swiftly to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities when they arise, helping your business drive more revenue.
One of the most valuable call center training topics you can include in your program is how to use call center software effectively. No matter what your business uses — a virtual call center package, or an on-premises, hosted, or inbound call center solution — your agents must be trained to make the best use of the tools available.
Software features like intelligent routing in call center solutions can direct calls to the most qualified agent right away. And with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), call center managers and their teams now have even more automated productivity tools at their fingertips.
These robust and intuitive tools can increase efficiency and help agents perform at their best. However, agents still typically require at least some level of training to build their confidence in using these capabilities and to feel comfortable working with an AI “partner” on the job.
Taking the five components of call center agent training into account, here are six strategies you can use to deliver effective training to your agents.
Even managers fully dedicated to quality management in the contact center cannot manually score every call for quality assurance (QA). At best, they can score only a small percentage without AI-powered tools that can automate the process. Scoring only a sample of calls leads to scoring bias and incomplete agent performance reviews. It also diminishes training efforts because agents do not receive meaningful feedback.
As we explained in a previous article, a more holistic picture of agents’ performance is required to ensure effective call center quality management. Invoca’s automated QA helps develop that picture by providing objective scores for every call into the call center in real time.
With Invoca, managers can focus on problem calls and deliver timely, targeted training to agents. Even better: Agents can review scores and call transcripts immediately after each call, so they can make their own adjustments on the fly and deliver higher-quality performances in future customer conversations.
Training manuals are necessary to help new hires in the contact center ramp up for real customer interactions. They can also be useful references for more experienced pros who want to keep best practices in focus. But you can’t expect static text alone to equip your agents with the skills they need to be effective on the job.
In addition to providing comprehensive training manuals, consider using tools like instructional videos and e-learning courses to engage agents and help them retain knowledge. Two-thirds of people say they are visual learners, and statistics suggest that people retain 95% of what they see versus 10% of what they read.
Other strategies you could use to supplement or reinforce what agents learn from training manuals include gamification and utilizing in-person training tactics, like role-playing. Simulating real-world scenarios is likely to have a much greater impact on agents’ learning than asking them to simply read examples in training manuals.
AI-generated call transcripts hold mountains of data that can be quickly analyzed to develop unique role-playing exercises and simulate actual situations for agents to practice soft skills and show technical expertise. You can also use information culled from automated QA to provide agents with custom training modules focused on their specific strengths and weaknesses.
Cross-training and job shadowing are other methods you can use to encourage team members to learn from each other.
With cross-training, you can equip agents with a broader range of skills, which makes them more versatile and capable of handling various tasks and customer issues. And through job shadowing, you can help less-experienced agents learn directly from colleagues who “know the ropes” and can share best practices and more.
These approaches address different training needs and are easy to introduce in the contact center. Call transcripts generated by Invoca’s AI conversation intelligence allow agents to review every call transcript, manager comment, and QA score. They can also add time-stamped pointers for colleagues they are cross-training.
Another tip for training success is to facilitate mentoring relationships between new hires and more experienced staff in the contact center. If they have someone to answer their questions about processes, challenges, and the company’s culture, new hires will feel more confident in their roles, faster. Mentors can also help new hires make connections across the organization and foster their professional growth.
Call center managers should strive to create a culture of coaching that empowers agents to improve their performance and rewards them for doing so. Building such a culture includes creating attainable, clear, and concrete goals, accentuating the positive, and giving agents the ability to self-coach using tools like conversation intelligence.
With Invoca, managers can make every day a coaching day. Call transcripts generated in real time with AI let managers review calls quickly, provide feedback on the fly, and engage in micro-coaching to help reinforce good behaviors and swiftly nip the bad ones in the bud.
Invoca’s AI platform helps support call center agent training by allowing managers to provide time-stamped feedback directly into call transcripts so that agents know exactly where they need to improve, and where they are excelling. Managers can even direct comments to the entire team when valuable coachable moments occur that everyone can learn from. And automated QA scoring and immediate access to call transcripts let agents receive, review, and act on objective evaluations of their performance faster.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of effective training in the call center is that your agents feel empowered to succeed. But there are other benefits, too, such as:
By helping your agents be the best they can be, you’ll be helping your customers as well. Agents with solid technical and soft skills and access to robust technology tools can solve more customer problems effectively and at a faster pace. Invoca’s State of the Contact Center Report found that agent satisfaction improves customer satisfaction scores by 62%.
Agents who participate in regular training and feel supported in their work are happier and more engaged. Engaged employees are more dependable. They will also be more inclined to be creative and innovative in their work, potentially coming up with new ideas on how everyone on the team can work smarter and more efficiently.
By providing meaningful training to your agents, you will see huge gains in efficiency and productivity in the call center. Statistics indicate that call centers with satisfied agents can boost efficiency by 56% and improve agent retention by 39%.
When you combine effective call center training, increased automation, greater productivity, heightened efficiency, higher agent retention, and enhanced customer satisfaction, your business can’t help but realize bottom-line benefits like reduced costs and more profitability. Your agents will be well-positioned to close or drive more sales. And you’ll likely find it easier to retain more agents and customers, too.
Invoca has features that you can use to train call center agents appropriately and help improve contact center performance. Let’s review and expand on a few key points discussed in this post:
Invoca provides the coaching tools to turn every agent in your contact center into your best agent and to help call center managers be more effective, too. With Invoca’s AI-driven platform, you can enhance agent training, onboard new hires, coach and mentor less-experienced agents, boost call-handling quality, improve the customer experience, increase close rates and customer satisfaction, and much more.
Looking for more resources to help inform and enhance your call center training efforts? Check out these posts from Invoca:
If you’d like a firsthand look at how Invoca can help your call center training process, book a free demo with us today.
