If your call center wants to exceed customer service expectations, continously agent training and coaching is a recommended best practice.
It’s importance can’t be ignored because training and coaching has a direct impact not just on the agent performance but also on your customer satisfaction scores.
Customers tend to stick to your company for a long time if they get solutions to their problems in the least possible time.
And this is only possible when you have a skilled agent handling the calls.
Below are some best practices that can help you train agents in the best possible way.
Top 10 Tips for Call Center Agent Training
1. Introduce the team
First of all, call center agents must know who their superiors are and what role they have in the company.
Roles like call center managing directors, department heads, and agent supervisors must introduce themselves to the agents.
They must tell agents about their role and how agents can contact them.
By doing so, agents can reach to the concerned person when in need.
2. Empower your agents
A well-trained agent with the right set of tools can make better and individual decisions.
When agents make decisions on their own, it leads to higher customer satisfaction and sometimes ensures single call resolution that results in positive customer experience.
Besides value-driven services, agents must be encouraged to focus on client-brand relationships as well.
3. Agents must know the business thoroughly
Every agent should have in-depth knowledge about the business, the product, and the call center operations.
It gives them the power to handle customer queries in a better way.
Moreover, understanding the company culture, mission, vision, and core values helps them to interact with the customer in a manner that aligns with business values.
Also, you must understand your customer as well. It will help you improve the quality of services you provide.
Thus, understanding your business and customer will help you retain them, serve them better, and increase the client base as well.
4. Understanding the training needs of each agent
Every agent in an organization is different from the other, i.e., having different personal and professional backgrounds, different skill sets, and knowledge.
Though having diversity is beneficial for a company, at the same time, you have to train these agents based on their individual needs. That’s how they will acquire the necessary skillsets that the customer facing job demands.
Identify the knowledge or learning gaps wrt each individual and try to adjust training as per the needs.
For example: In training, some agents respond more positively to training content types like graphics and videos while others may like to read and learn.
5. Make agents learn how to handle calls
Learning how to handle calls is essential from a call center agent perspective. It’s not a one day work but requires agents to be coached continously.
Initially, they can practice how to deal with customers using role plays, realistic simulations, and case studies in a training program.
They can also listen to recordings of real call center interactions of top agents that will help them understand different types of appropriate greetings, transfer techniques, and closing techniques.
But nothing works better than handling real-time calls.
Handling real-time calls will help agents to get practical experience that is not offered by role-playing.
6. Feedback from managers
Managers or team leaders must listen to the calls of agents and provide feedback.
Managers can tell the agents what they are doing wrong in their calls, personally.
But if they are doing good, then managers need to praise agents in front of everyone that motivates them to improve their performance even further.
7. Mentored by top performers
Every new hire must pair up with a top performing agent so that they can learn from the best.
Not only this improves the relationship between the employees but, also it encourages the new agents to perform like the top performers.
It also helps new agents to get settled in call center life and a person to go to whenever they have a question.
8. Use of speech analytics
Using speech analytics can help you improve the performance of your agents in a variety of ways.
Speech analytics software like Enthu can analyze every call of the agents and provide feedback on those calls.
You can pinpoint the specific calls with issues and identify trends across the whole contact center calls.
This information helps to identify opportunities for coaching by using examples of good and bad calls. Also, you can use this data to refine scripts, determine customer sentiment, predict average call handle time, etc., and a whole lot of other things to train agents and improve call center performance.
9. Teach technical skills using demonstration
It will be a lot easier for agents to learn new tools and equipment if some expert demonstrates the same.
A seasoned employee can show agents how the tool works or complete a task. Then, you can ask an agent to repeat the steps to understand what they have learned.
The demonstration is a great way to teach new software or procedures that are error-prone.
10. Take feedback from agents on training sessions
Training sessions are to improve the performance of agents, so isn’t it best that they also have a say in what they learn?
You need to take feedback from agents about the training sessions and work on their suggestions.
Working on suggestions is essential because agents are the ones that are in direct contact with the customers, so they know best.
Also, allow them to ask questions or give suggestions during training sessions as well.
Conclusion
Implementing these call center agent training best practices not only helps you with call center quality assurrance but also improves agent performance and customer satisfaction.
Therefore, training call center agents is of utmost importance.
