Above and Beyond: how prioritizing a Culture of learning creates contact center success #AI #CX #customerexperience #callcenter #contactcenter
56% of employees feel that opportunity for career growth is more important than salary.
A brand’s contact center has become a valuable touchpoint for creating authentic customer connections while continuing to be a high-traffic, high-stakes hub of problem-solving and multitasking for the agents who work there. Contact center work can be stressful and challenging, often resulting in a higher-than-average turnover, but new priorities and approaches to employee training are starting to change contact center work environments for the better.
Agents are looking at their careers through a long-term lens. Salary and employment perks continue to be important motivations, but dynamics that influence agents’ day-to-day satisfaction like workplace culture and career development carry more weight than ever before. Brands that prioritize ongoing training to help their agents succeed are also investing in their career growth, paving the way for agents to become essential, established members of a committed team.
With ongoing, adaptive training beyond the onboarding stage, agents can become experts at creating stronger customer relationships and consistent service quality with every client interaction. Learning opportunities that build resiliency, tech fluency and emotional intelligence are especially crucial; once acquired, these strengths help agents develop a more autonomous and authentic approach to working with customers, even the challenging ones, and their resourcefulness can help mitigate time-consuming case escalations, allowing management more opportunity to dedicate to training, operations and development.
In this post, we’re going to look at how ongoing training opportunities strengthen agent skills and workplace culture and highlight a few trends in agent training that we think are worth a closer look at. Let’s get started…
1. It’s time to consider technology as a training partner. AI-enabled technology is likely already a part of your contact center’s day-to-day operations, and its structure can be easily leveraged to support ongoing training opportunities as well. Digitally delivered training can be designed to fit into agents’ workdays as bite-sized modules that can be completed when call volumes are lower, allowing agents a more self-serve approach to skills development. Using AI and customer data collection to help build and update your team’s training materials and process can make training more accessible and useful for all agents, from developing better emotional intelligence to learning how to use AI insights to handle customer interactions, to incorporating recommendations to suggest additional products or special offers.
2. Tap into a source of experienced, industry-focused perspective by involving senior agents, management and leadership in training events, and build better communication within your organization at the same time. Inviting leadership to participate in ongoing agent training signals to them the importance of the contact center’s contribution towards achieving the brand’s goals. It also gives agents a chance to interact with senior staff to learn from their experience and perspective. Management and leadership involvement can boost workplace morale by fostering a trickle-down sense of teamwork, and bring a new perspective to training by educating agents about industry-related trends and challenges as well as the future of the brand within its industry.
3. Bring the brand’s best customer service practices to life by involving your contact center’s senior agents in training design and process. By incorporating the experience and skills developed by senior agents into training modules and practical exercises, newer agents can learn actionable approaches from real-world cases as they connect more closely with senior agents. Alongside determining factors like AI-empowered insights and marketing department guidance, senior agents can also help direct the evolution of training materials and processes; by encouraging feedback from all agents about their training experiences, programs can be adapted to better meet ongoing and future needs
4. A supportive management team recognizes that agents who are supported to try out, identify and develop new skills that they find compelling will be more engaged in both the training process and in their career progress. Ongoing training should allow agents to discover more about their strengths and interests in their role, and any specific aptitudes that can be developed, helping to build that agent’s sense of motivation and ownership in their career path. Internal or agent-facing AI can also help identify previously unrecognized strengths in both individual agents and in the team as a whole, giving management a higher rate of accuracy in choosing agents for specific roles, and agents a more natural and enduring fit for their unique personalities.
Workplace culture trends come and go, but prioritizing employee development is ever-green. Designing an adaptable and collaborative approach to ongoing skills training can bring the best out in your agents, and give them a different perspective of their impact on the customers they serve and the brand they support. Promoting a culture of learning in your contact center proves to agents that their efforts are important and valued, as is their career growth, giving them a deeper appreciation and commitment to their role in the brand’s success.
bespokeCX gives contact center teams the framework, tools and perspective to enhance agent training initiatives, deliver consistent customer experience, and build an agile, supportive workplace culture. By maximizing operational alignment and engagement, bespokeCX supports innovative and ongoing training and feedback processes that help agents excel at building and growing your brand’s valuable customer relationships. Visit www.bespokecx.com to learn more.