Meeting the New Challenges of Employee Training, Coaching and Engagement

Since the contact center agent is the face and voice that often defines a company in the eyes of existing and potential customers, workforce recruiting must focus on identifying vital traits, skills, and abilities in individuals. But even when those who meet the highest qualifications are put in place, they must be trained, continuously coached, and kept actively engaged to be successful.

Companies which can recruit and retain qualified and motivated front-line personnel are positioned to operate more efficiently while building customer loyalty. According to a McKinsey report, “Failure to keep talented employees can have significant repercussions… attrition can erode customer satisfaction while increasing operating costs. Each new agent hire is estimated to cost the contact center $10,000 to $20,000 in training, direct recruiting costs, and lost productivity during ramp up.”

Taking every step to keep top performers onboard is now more critical than ever. Although many consumers have become comfortable with online self-service tools, once they decide to call into the contact center the issues are almost always more complicated to resolve. Since people are already frustrated at being unable to find answers on other channels, they are on edge from the moment when an agent picks up the call.

This dilemma has only grown more acute during a crisis in which many customers are already panicked. According to a recent blog on CrmXchange by Uniphore, 60% of consumers said they were given different or conflicting information on current conditions from the news, leaving more questions than answers. Adding more fuel to the fire is that customers are often faced with longer wait times as companies adapt to a new wave of work-at-home agents. Nearly 40% who were put on hold with a company after calling about crisis-related issues stated that they were annoyed or frustrated.

Further McKinsey research suggests a need for companies to take a proactive stance when interacting with their contact-center employees by focusing on engagement and finding ways to increase their comfort and happiness wherever they are working. They found a startling difference in outcomes. Engaged and satisfied call-center employees are:

• 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year
• 4x more likely to stay than dissatisfied colleagues
• 16x more likely to refer friends to their company
• 3.3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues

So how does a company ensure that these valuable assets are happier and more productive? Actions in three areas can have a major impact– targeted coaching, employment of updated training techniques and applying proven strategies to enhance employee engagement —and they are available for all contact centers to take.

A focused educational alternative now makes it possible for a business’s entire workforce planning team to benefit from the latest innovative thinking without ever having to take so much as a step away from their home offices.

CrmXchange is presenting a premier online virtual conference: Techniques for Training, Coaching and Employee Engagement, to be held from June 15-19. The event is being produced in conjunction with the Quality Assurance and Training Connection, (QATC), a membership association created specifically for quality assurance and training professionals in the contact center environment.

The web conference is structured to benefit contact center leaders at all levels – supervisors, managers, directors, and VPS. The fully interactive event enables attendees to meet with industry experts and colleagues who will answer questions in real time while providing updated strategies and techniques. The schedule is designed to provide direction to meet the changing needs of businesses transitioning to a greater percentage of work-at-home agents but will also provide guidance for companies still maintaining on-premise employees.

Among the topics to be covered in-depth are:

• Learning how to work in a remote world
• Best methods for coaching and training remote and on-premise agents
• How to optimize agent performance in the new reality
• Developing an effective instructor competency program

The event will kick off on Monday, June 15 with a focused keynote address entitled “Do Better Work – Finding Clarity and Camaraderie in a Remote World.” It will be presented by Max Yoder, CEO and Co-Founder, Lessonly who will offer stories of the best ways for businesses to navigate the path to working from home, providing specific examples of how to foster understanding, accountability, and progress from disparate teams.

Other areas to be explored in this targeted, complimentary virtual conference include:

• How to Foster Agent Engagement and Human Connection Through Coaching Your Remote Contact Center Team in a Post-Pandemic World
• Nurturing Employees to Become Ambassadors and High Performers
• Agent Coaching and Engagement for Remote Service Excellence
• Creating a Solid Gamification Strategy to Engage Employees Near and Far

In addition to the educational sessions, attendees can visit the booths of leading suppliers in the online exhibit hall. They can then download white papers, videos, product data sheets and other vital content from leading solution providers and organizations such as CallMiner, NICE inContact, Calabrio, NICE, Lessonly, C3 Software and Sharpen.

Register now at no cost for the complete four-day event: there is no limit on how many people a company can sign up. For those who cannot attend the live presentations or have the time to visit the exhibits during the event, links to all sessions and the exhibit hall will remain open for one full week after the event is completed.

Meaningful Agent Training For Meaningful Customer Experiences

How important is agent experience when delivering exceptional customer experience? Eighty-six percent of CX executives believe it is the #1 factor. When it comes to customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction is the key. In the live Virtual Conference webcast, Lauren Comer from NICE InContact walks us through a comprehensive worksheet to help us better understand how to conduct meaningful agent training for more meaningful customer experiences.

It’s simple: satisfied and engaged agents are more likely to stay in their jobs and to have a positive impact on the overall customer experience. But how do we make sure we keep our employees satisfied and engaged? After all, the types of problems agents are handling are increasingly complex, and they need to solve these problems in a way that is efficient and satisfactory for the customer. The answer lies in training: creating more time for it and adding in higher-value skills.

We know what you’re thinking: creating time is easier said than done. After all, you cannot simply add time to your day. When we think about how we can gain more time for training, it is not about adding time, it’s about being more efficient with our time. We can do this by focusing on three things: accelerating new agent onboarding, training smarter with analytics, and pushing miniature bite-sized learning packages.

When accelerating new agent onboarding, it’s not about cutting onboarding time shorter. You’ll want to keep that duration the same while focusing on the activities and skills that really matter to the customer experience. Today, the majority of onboarding time is spent on contact center processes, technology used to service customers, and learning to use the knowledge base. The solution is an all-in-one intuitive agent interface. It’s simple: less complicated technology leads to less training required on systems. Instead, your agents can spend more time on service and use freed onboarding time on value-added training.

Many businesses have a one-size-fits-all approach to ongoing training. This is too manual to identify agent-specific skill sets, and too time consuming to be prescriptive in training. By using analytics to pinpoint agent-specific skill gaps, businesses may evaluate agent interactions based on experience through customer sentiment, customer complaints, specific words and phrases, as well as feedback from customer surveys.

In general, businesses do not prioritize setting aside time for ongoing training and development. The perception is that there is not enough time because of the typical contact center training mold. These training sessions tend to be formal, classroom style training that last at least one hour and require the presence of every employee. Instead, push “just-in-time” bite sized training. These are short, custom learning packages that are accessible from contact handling surfaces. Pushing bite-sized training packages can transform idle time into training time.

Creating time for training will transform how your agents develop and adapt overtime, becoming better equipped to handle the increasingly complex problems being thrown at them. Meanwhile, focusing that training to include higher-value skills such as problem solving, multi-tasking, and emotional intelligence will hand them the toolkit to success.

In the last 12 months, forty-three percent of contact centers experienced an increase in contact complexity. Prepare your agents by modeling what effective problem-solving looks like, identifying common problems in your contact center, ensuring all agents understand all of the problem-solving resources available to them, and allowing room for hands-on role play.

In fifty percent of contact centers, contact volume has increased in the past twelve months. Meanwhile, sixty-seven percent of agents indicated a number of channels as a factor contributing to stress. Today’s digital omnichannel world requires new juggling skills from agents. Get ahead of potential stress by providing your agents with hands on exercises for multitasking practice, sharing best practices across peers, and incorporating screen recordings into QM practices.

Just as well, emotional intelligence is key to successful customer interactions. When your agents have superior emotional intelligence, they are better at managing their emotions as well as the emotions of others. Teaching emotional intelligence is tricky. You cannot just teach the agent the empathy piece, but you also have to teach them to cultivate that emotion into effective problem solving. Do this by creating a list of recommended words and phrases by incoming sentiment /scenarios and provide hands-on exercises with your agents using active role play.

To reiterate, the keys to meaningful agent training is time and value. Creating more time for training, maximizing time with the right tools, and rethinking the training model will set you up for success. Focusing on higher-value skills like problem solving, multitasking, and emotional Intelligence will better prepare your agents for the evolving and increasingly complex contact center. You can listen to the full webcast here: https://bit.ly/3dOPln9