Using voice recordings to coach call centre staff
Carl Nancollas provides insight into why voice recording can make training more effective and improve performance of agents.
How much money does your company spend on training each year? £2,000 per agent? More? Less?
If I told you the industry average is a whopping £8,000 to £10,000 would you be surprised?
Okay, here’s another question. How much time is spent, on average, training staff each year? Again, there’s a shocker – on average, 20 hours are taken up with training activity, either on a one-to-one coaching basis or as part of a group training exercise.
It goes without saying that any tool that delivers an improvement in staff performance while reducing the expense and time required for training has to be a good thing.
Managers are realising the potential of using recording, fast retrieval and intelligent playback features not only to monitor performance but also to train and evaluate operatives. The ability to play back a telephone conversation instantly to an operative is an invaluable training tool in itself, enabling supervisors to provide intensive one-to-one training ‘on the fly’.
Using voice recording for training purposes isn’t just for large call centres; small operations can benefit too. A basic voice recorder, used with a fully integrated quality monitoring tool, will allow a supervisor to access a random sample of recordings that can be used for individual coaching purposes. The quality of calls can be improved considerably very quickly with intensive mentoring tailored to each operator’s specific challenge, shortfall or experience.
Tagging calls
Most voice recording solutions have a tag feature which supports a basic search facility based on a number of definable fields such as policy number, incident reference or postcode. This can be extremely useful to trainers wanting to select specific sessions or for demonstrating the progression of an incident over time using a log of calls.
In addition to calls being identified according to standard criteria, field names can be modified to assist trainers and supervisors further. A good example is to define a search tag as either a ‘sale’ or a ‘no sale’. This can help to identify and analyse the calls that get results (and those that don’t) both quickly and easily.
The coaching tools available to trainers and supervisors have grown in number and sophistication, with many of these tools offering advanced features based on recording systems that support free seating. This is especially useful for larger call centres as it allows for immediate playback to a specific agent regardless of his or her location or the extension being used.
Agent evaluation
Along with call recording, many call centres have an agent ‘evaluation form’ which allows them to score the agent’s performance during the conversation. These forms cover all aspects of the call from call-handling skills, product knowledge and sales performance such as cross selling and closing.
Self assessment
Imagine the benefits to your organisation of allowing agents to perform self assessment or even giving them the ability to critique the team leader’s calls! It sends out the right message to your staff, it shows that you are willing to listen and that you are allowing them to participate in their future training, thus showing trust and, more importantly, commitment.
Carl Nancollas is EMEA Manager of Storacall Voice Systems (www.storacall.co.uk)
[Do you use voice recordings to coach your staff? Do you have any tips that you would like to pass on? Please drop your thoughts into the comments box below.]
I would be interested to understand where the figures used in this article came from. Having spent 20 years training agents in Call Centres I find it hard to believe the average spend on training per agent is £8k- £10k p.a. This would mean that if the other figure was right of 20 hours p.a. (which it isn’t) the average company was spending £500 per hour on training per agent!!. As a training provider how I wish this was true!!
the author doesn’t say where he gets these figures from and some clarification would be appreciated.
Comment by Clive Harris — 11 Dec 2008 @ 2:27 pm
Clive
The figures where obtained from a survey we carried out on 100 of our customers, the figures are the cost to train a new call centre agent, from the initial recruitment process until you get your agents working in the ‘live’ environment so cover the recruitment (advertising and interview costs), induction phase of the training all the way to the ‘go-live’ of that agent.
Comment by Carl Nancollas — 11 Dec 2008 @ 8:34 pm
Those facts seem pretty spot on to me!
Comment by tim — 26 Feb 2009 @ 12:06 pm
Great article!
Comment by chadadams — 4 Aug 2009 @ 2:50 am