ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 35)

EXPERT’S ANGLE Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? BY JASON MITCHELL The job of a customer service, technical support or sales representative is complex and not getting any easier. In just minutes, the agent must address intricate customer needs and questions, exhibit detailed product or service knowledge and deploy strong service or selling skills — often using multiple tools and technologies. Add in the need for multilingual support and the shrinking labor pool of entrylevel personnel, and you have the “perfect storm” impacting today’s contact centers. How do companies prepare new customer service agents to handle these increasing job responsibilities? Today, most organizations follow the traditional knowledgebased learning (KBL) approach. Typical KBL curricula provide new employees with an orientation session, several weeks of new-hire training and a transition period where they receive a level of additional hands-on support. Then agents are pushed to the front lines where they are expected to deliver a superior service experience while attempting to upsell new services to the customer base. While these are all valuable tools and processes, they may not be enough. Agents are struggling to balance the demands of learning more complex product knowledge faster, building customer loyalty with a superior service experience, and hitting upsell targets — all in the context of a single phone call where their productivity is measured based on the length of the icmi’s insight The frontline agent’s job has become more complex. Convergys Corporation’s Jason Mitchell offers his thoughts on why the traditional knowledge-based training approach is no longer adequate to ensure stellar performance and continuous improvement. client interaction. The following are the common drawbacks associated with KBL training materials and processes: > PERIODIC. Most contact center training is offered once, as part of the new-hire process. Although product and offering updates are communicated, regular, ongoing, formal training sessions as part of an agent development plan are rare. > INCONSISTENT. When the same work is supported from multiple locations, the curricula, processes, examples and exercises can vary significantly between locations. Even when a “mandatory” or standard curriculum is used, the local training delivery or facilitation staff often adds its own custom touches and modifications that they consider to be best practices. The resulting inconsistency can be exacerbated when dealing with centers in multiple countries supporting the same customer base or line of business. > INEFFECTIVE. Curricula are often designed without a valid adult learning methodology. When that occurs, the level of knowledge retention will be abysmally low among learners, resulting in poor call quality, lowered customer satisfaction and lackluster agent performance. > OUTDATED. Contact center curricula are often old and outdated, not keeping up with the changing support technologies and the most likely customer queries. Most of the training is done in a classroom with one-way communication from the instructor to the students. It often does not leverage hands-on simulations, Web-based learning and ondemand resources that align to the types of methods that prospective agents are accustomed to. This can often lead to frustration among learners when they reach the floor and quickly realize that much of their education was not relevant. > NOT RELEVANT TO THE JOB. Most training curricula are organized by topic (product, customer service, agent tools), not task (resolving complaint “x”). This knowledgebased approach relies on the same method taken in school — chapterby-chapter learning. After two, three, four or more weeks of training, learners find it hard to tie together relevant topics. THE IMPACT OF INEFFICIENT AND INEFFECTIVE TRAINING Inefficient, ineffective training translates to agents who are not ready to do their jobs. They become frustrated, and employee turnover increases, leading to higher costs in training and in ongoing contact center operations. Consider the impact, blow by blow. First, the learning curve for new hires will be significantly longer | JANUARY 2008 www.icmi.com 35 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 Contents Customer Care Technologies Ad Index Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Prehire Tests In The Center Strategy: Video Contact Centers Show Preview Operations: Knowledge Management Industry Research Contact Centers Face Today's Realities: A Case for Consolidation 2.0 Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? The Key to Innovation Is Maintaining Your Strengths Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center's Role

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.