4 Tips to Take Contact Centre Training to the Next Level

Training is an integral activity in contact centres, whether that be new-hire onboarding or ongoing training and development of agents.

However, with so many other business priorities, training doesn’t always get the love and attention it deserves.

Even in those organisations where training is a cultural cornerstone, providing meaningful, engaging, and effective training is still a challenge.

Here are some top tips to take your training programme to the next level.

1. Visible Leadership Commitment to Training

Leadership needs to “walk the talk” when it comes to training. Leaders often verbally communicate the importance of training, but their actions contradict that sentiment.

Often in contact centres, training is scheduled but then cancelled and pushed to the side the moment things get busy. While meeting short-term customer demands is an utmost priority, developing your agents to support your customers in the long term is equally important.

Contact centres should make training a priority, and occasionally decide whether a one-day dip in service levels is worth a longer-term performance return.

One way to help mitigate this time-allocation tug-of-war is to factor in some extra shrinkage when scheduling to ensure you have enough agents scheduled to cover those agents who will be in training.

Another consideration is to have multiple shifts for trainings, thus minimising the impact of those agents off the phone at training.

2. Ensure Opportunities for Quick Application of Learning

When it comes to training, if you don’t use it, you lose it. Thus, to ensure that training concepts “stick” in your agents’ behaviours and processes, look for opportunities for quick application in daily work.

Did agents just attend training on a new ticketing system? Give them time to create a ticket in the new system within the next business day to ensure that they really learned how to do it.

Also, depending on the topic, another way to drive application is to incorporate components of the concepts or processes learned into the quality evaluation forms used to assess performance.

3. Integrate New Topics and Themes

Sometimes corporate training can make you feel like you’re living in the movie Groundhog Day – the same exact topic, but just on a different day with a slightly different spin.

It is inevitable that you will need to train on the same topic repeatedly, especially given contact centre turnover and compliance requirements. However, try your best to incorporate new themes, examples, or training approaches to make it feel less redundant.

Also, if there are more tenured folks that have already mastered the concepts, don’t require them to attend unless truly necessary.

4. Don’t Assume You Know What Training Staff Need

Although you probably have a good pulse on the contact centre’s training gaps, don’t make assumptions on what training is needed.

Poll your staff to understand which concepts or processes they are struggling with the most, and train on those items first.

Additionally, engaging the team in your curriculum plans fosters engagement and buy-in for the training.