How Workforce Management Can Supplement Call Center Training

As the way people communicate with their product and service providers shifts, the way call centers need to communicate with customers needs to shift. Today, many call centers are training agents to be customer journey guides. The more agents understand how to best support customers at all touchpoints, the higher customers will rate their experiences. The sticking point to this strategy becomes: what’s the best way to train agents to support customers in 2020?

Many Call Centers Are Using Old Methods

While classroom training still has a (limited) place in call center agent training, it’s not ideal. People absorb information when it’s broken into smaller snippets (rather than hours of lectures), and today’s high-tech call center requires much more hands-on training. Simulations can help, as can role-playing and e-learning software. Mentoring is also a great approach: more experienced agents are paired with new recruits to help pass on wisdom and experience.

Workforce Management Plays a Role

Workforce management is at the heart of the call center. It’s the pivot on which the entire call center operation turns. But how does it help with training?

For call center operations to be successful, management needs to keep an eye the numbers, ensuring that there are enough agents in place to handle customer queries. Workforce management is at the heart of this: it’s a process and a technology designed to achieve and maintain maximum call center operational efficiency by ensuring that the right number of agents, with the right skill sets, are in place and working at the right time. In short, when the call center needs to engage in training, managers must first ensure that there is ample time to do so without losing quality. Adequate training is something that needs to be scheduled, and scheduling is the job of workforce management.

Don’t Try to Cram in Training as An Afterthought

Despite the importance of training on the customer experience, many call center managers still consider training something to be jammed in if and when there’s time, according to a recent article by Customer Think’s Jeannie Walters.

“When you ask these employees to ‘make time’ for training, you are letting them know this training is not really a priority,” wrote Walters. “It’s simply not fair to ask workers to create space in their schedules, outside of their regular duties and hours, to ‘check it off the list.’”

The solution is to visit the core of your call center operations – workforce management – and schedule training into workers’ daily tasks. This ongoing education initiative isn’t wasted time. It’s a vital function of customer care and needs to be part of the organization’s mission.

Edited by Maurice Nagle

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