AGENT SKILL DEVELOPMENT AND ONGOING TRAINING

Ongoing training is designed to provide the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to do the current job better and plant the seeds for employment in the future. Training never stops. Most companies never train their agents beyond the new hire training because they are too busy putting out new hire classes.

Experienced agents receive an average of six training days per year. The best companies in the world recognize that training is not a single event but an ongoing process. When you invest in your current workforce today, it will pay big dividends when expansion and growth occur later. Your current workforce needs to grow and expand along with the contact center. A best practice is to provide recurring refresher courses and cross-training opportunities for existing employees.

– Refresher Courses

– New product and services

– Systems; applications, and best practices

– Personal and Professional development

The best athletes know the power of practicing the basics. That’s all ballplayers do at spring training – practice the basics. Olympians spend years developing and practicing the basics. Agents may not be Olympians, but shouldn't they also practice the basics? What agent skills, knowledge, and attitudes should be reinforced?

Product Review
Nothing is more fundamental than product training. Most companies are good at training employees on their products. Agents must be thoroughly fluent in their product knowledge to be genuinely credible with customers. Not just what products and services you sell but what those products do, how customers use them, and how customers benefit. What issues do customers experience and why? This includes keeping up with new products and services. Agents can become product authorities when using the products, even in a lab or classroom setting. When agents believe in your products and confidently convey this belief, customers respect agents more and gain the trust needed to resolve calls on the first call.

Systems & Applications
New hires are always rushed through new hire training and forced to learn new products, systems, and proprietary applications. Please return to them after 90 days to review the application's best practices. Have your power users submit more efficient and effective ways to use the applications. They have figured out shortcuts, tips, and tricks. Cross-pollinate the knowledge. This can reduce your call times, improve first-call resolution, reduce transfers, and when you make the job easier, you improve morale and tenure.

• The more flexible the contact center agents are, the more resourceful the site can be in the changing marketplace. Cross-training agents allow them to “fill in” when the site is short-handed. One product line queue is often busier than others, and shifting already trained agents reduces costs by leveraging internal talent. No contact center can afford to have agents sitting idle because they only know how to perform one function. The more your agents know, the more valuable they become and the more flexible and responsible the site is to callers.
• Cross-trained agents become a hiring pool for promotions, special projects, and management. The more in-depth technical knowledge an agent has, the more valuable he becomes to the site. Agents are motivated to stick around when the company invests in career development. The company is genuinely interested in the agent’s career growth. Perhaps you allow the most motivated and driven agents to self-select the cross-training opportunities, and you sit back and watch the rising stars.
• Cross-trained agents smooth out the ebb and flow of productivity when agents are out due to illness, emergency, injuries, and other unavoidable absences. Team members can easily cover for an absent team member when they are already skilled in the absent team member’s key tasks, products, and system applications.
• Cross-training eliminates skills gaps, keeping your site up and running and consistently productive. It motivates agents, keeps them engaged, and constantly grows and evolves, and you raise the skill level of your entire workforce.

Compliance training is essential to educating employees about industry and governmental laws and regulations regarding workplace tasks and duties. It is the most critical training an organization can provide, yet it can be an afterthought or put on the back burner for a rainy day.

Without proper training, the company may risk lawsuits and penalties. Conduct ongoing compliance training to educate the workforce on current and new regulations to avoid potential risks. If your industry is highly regulated, you know that rules rarely stand still, and ongoing compliance training is a must to avoid penalties.

Compliance training keeps agents updated on regulation changes and how they impact their jobs. The traditional “read and sign” compliance format is simple but misses proper knowledge integration. Many employees read the content and manage to pass the quiz at the end but are unable to apply it to their jobs. They fail to understand the regulations when asked about them. Regulatory auditors are seeing through the “read and sign” and are beginning to interview workers. The workforce must be prepared for compliance interrogation or jeopardize their entire operation.

Compliance training doesn’t have to be painfully boring! The best compliance training courses are conducted in January, integrated into your core business, and reinforced throughout the year.

The next step is changing the mindset of the instructional design team. They must approach compliance training as problem solvers, creating timely, relevant, meaningful, and actionable learning. For proper knowledge integration, create engaging compliance courses that facilitate the application of the regulations. Translate legalese topics into the real world to provide context and meaningful applications. Instructional designers need to step up their game and make compliance more fun.

Holding training sessions helps employees understand the best practice standards and how to perform tasks more appropriately and efficiently. You develop a culture of compliance and how the culture values the laws, regulations, policies, and procedures that it lives by.  Build your compliance training program around what rules and regulations affect job performance. What policies and procedures affect job performance? You can always layer in the “nice-to-know” material after the “need-to-know” has been mastered.