Mastering Frontline Skill Development
1 May, 2007
By: Laurie HotardEach year, companies spend millions of dollars and countless hours on product knowledge training for contact center agents. Unfortunately, most find that a few months down the road those product facts and attributes have long been forgotten by the majority of trainees. Flawless and fluent product knowledge is essential to an agent’s ability to satisfy customer needs and boost the company’s bottom line. Finding efficient, cost-effective product training that produces long-term retention is critical to remain competitive and profitable.
Enter product mastery, a training method that is both fun and flexible to use, helping contact center agents become more confident, proactive and knowledgeable when engaging in solutions-oriented discussions with customers. Product mastery is a learning technology that changes the way agents think about their company’s products and services, increases their selling power and satisfies customers’ needs.
Beyond Product Knowledge Training
Have you ever tried to learn a language well enough to get by, but later found yourself struggling after, “How are you? I am fine.”? How confident will you be when you try to use that language to ask questions or engage in a conversation? Similarly, traditional product training gives contact center agents general familiarity with a product, but not enough information to uncover and serve customers’ needs and respond effectively in certain situations.
Knowing that a product exists is not the same as knowing how to answer a customer’s questions about that product, yet many contact centers continue to train agents by lecturing, giving them reference material, asking them to listen to an experienced agent and then turning them loose on the phones. This does not usually produce good results on the job.
The fact is, people do not put information to work in high-pressure situations unless they have some fluency in recalling it and talking about it. What does produce good results in the fast-paced contact center environment is a learning methodology that goes beyond product knowledge to true product mastery.
Product Mastery Benefits
Product mastery gives contact center agents the power to use information smoothly and easily, as though it is second nature. It is achieved through a learning system that sharpens agents’ knowledge and boosts their confidence so they can engage with customers in a way that builds trust, strengthens relationships and differentiates the company in the marketplace.
A lot of product training is overwhelming because it exposes agents to every bit of information at once. Product mastery recognizes that people learn best when they learn in steps or layers. Product mastery presents basic product information in an organized and engaging manner; cements features and benefits through timed practices; and challenges the agent to recall and use that information to diagnose customer needs, present solutions and make the sale.
Mastery learning is not a new methodology. It was originally developed by behavioral psychologists who wanted to improve the efficiency and retention of learning material. Mastery learning has expanded to include concepts from many other branches of psychology. It has existed in some form for over 25 years and has been extensively applied and tested with a variety of people, including professional athletes, musicians and students.
Product mastery is effective for contact center and other work environments in which employees must:
• Quickly recognize, diagnose and solve complex problems
• Focus on questioning, listening to and responding to what others are saying
• Recall vital information not used frequently
• Operate independent of job aids, help screens and reference manuals
• Operate in a focused, effective manner in a distracting, noisy environment.
Product mastery helps contact centers excel at achieving four key metrics:
• Capture more sales opportunities — When agents present customers with accurate, effective solutions that meet their needs, they are more likely to purchase the recommended products and services and feel they have received a more satisfying service experience.
• Retain the best agents — The more confident agents are in their ability to service customers, the happier they are with their jobs. Happy employees translate into reduced turnover for the contact center.
• Cross-sell products and services — Agents who know the attributes of multiple products, ask the right questions to match those attributes to customer needs and combine appropriate product and service solutions generate more cross-selling opportunities.
• Retain customers — Customers whose needs are met by the products and services they have purchased and who trust the advice provided by agents are more likely to remain loyal to the company.
Why Product Mastery Works
Mastery learning methodology is similar to any good training design in that it includes self-study, exercises that reinforce the self-study and face-to-face exercises that enable agents to apply their new product knowledge in life-like scenarios.
Product mastery cards and timed practice are the foundation of the learning process. The cards help agents master key features, facts and benefits about the company’s products. The information agents need to remember is broken down into small bites for each key product type and placed on the cards as two-part conversational statements. The front side of each card provides a cue for the second half, which appears on the back.
Mastery cards are not the same as flash cards. The technology used is a vast improvement over flash cards when it comes to learning information that must be recalled instantly and included in a conversation. Flash cards present a question and answer, or a problem and solution. Flash cards are a useful tool in memorizing facts for an upcoming test, but they do not have the same effect on memory as do mastery cards. The entire mastery card, front and back, can be viewed as the answer to a potential customer question, phrased as a complete sentence.
Cards can be written to reflect the wording an agent might use with a customer, as long as construction and content guidelines are followed. Product mastery cards cover the answers to questions that customers would ask, not the questions themselves, and serve as a bank of knowledge that can be used to match customer needs to the features and benefits of a particular product.
The mastery cards are used in a series of timed practices in which agents are challenged to recall the information on the cards more and more quickly, until they meet the mastery standard for those cards. Working against the clock creates the dynamic mental tension that pushes information from short-term to long-term memory and creates instant recall.
Once agents become familiar with the mastery cards, rapid recall exercises provide an opportunity to practice saying as many of the facts they learned as they can in a short period. This verbal exercise forces agents to think faster and build the mind-mouth coordination needed to speak confidently in real customer situations. Essential to the success of rapid recall exercises are time, measurement and accuracy. Performing drills against a standard for number of facts per minute helps agents quickly increase their retention.
Conversational practice is the next step in building product mastery. During short exercises, agents learn to relate products to customers by presenting them in a fluid, cohesive, conversational manner. Without conversational practice, agents tend to talk too fast and overwhelm customers with too much information. So, while they should recall a lot, they should dole out the information only as needed in a conversation.
Practice and Reinforcement are Keys to Success
Building mastery of product information is a process that requires practice on the part of agents and reinforcement of performance on the part of managers. To become masters, agents build speed and accuracy with the mastery cards, and then follow their review of each card set with rapid recall and conversational practice exercises. Without all of these steps, they will either talk too much or too fast to customers, forget what they learned or feel they know the information but have trouble talking about it during customer conversations. Through coaching, managers can continually evaluate and provide feedback to agents on their performance.
When applied properly and consistently, product mastery is an invaluable training methodology for contact centers striving to increase their agents’ effectiveness at servicing and selling to customers. When contact center agents have truly mastered their company’s products and services, they are in prime position to recommend solutions most appropriate to customers’ needs—putting the company on the fast track to growth, profitability and customer retention.
