According to Contact Center Pipeline’s recent survey, the biggest challenge for today’s contact centers is high attrition rates—something that should come as no surprise when considering the average call center faces an average annual turnover rate of nearly 33%. And when asked what conditions must be present to create satisfied employees, 67% of contact center managers said relevant and sufficient training (Jabra). In fact, 41% of employees plan to leave those organizations with a training score of “poor”, as opposed to just 12% from those with a training score of “good”. So what are a few ways call centers can more effectively train and coach their employees to create a happier work environment and reduce attrition rates? Consider the following:
Coach in real-time: In the event an agent is struggling on the phone, whether it be a sales or customer service related interaction, managers should be prepared to lend a helping hand—especially in the initial days of their employment. With the help of silent monitor, whisper, and barge-in features, which are offered through many of today’s contact center solutions, managers can silently listen in to interactions, give agents suggestions during a call without the customer hearing, and even take over a conversation if necessary—a few simple ways to help guide them in the right direction.
Utilize Call Recordings: Call recordings have become a crucial training and coaching tool for today’s call centers. Not only do they allow managers to share successful/unsuccessful interactions with new employees to train them on how to work through different situations, but they can also be dissected and sent back to agents with suggestions/feedback through solutions such as Click2Coach. Managers should ensure that they are recording all calls within their contact centers, and that they are actually being monitored and used for quality and training purposes.
Generate Reports and Share Results: Call centers house an exponential amount of valuable data about everything from agent and campaign performance, to customer satisfaction—but it is of little to no value if it is not shared with agents, the individuals who are directly impacting these initiatives. Managers should aim to schedule regular meetings with agents to share KPIs, and discuss ways to improve their performance. Agents should also be aware of how their performance compares to that of their co-workers to better understand where they are stacking up.
