The Changing Face of Training
1 Jul, 2008
By: Mark W. BrodskyDoing More with Less
Today’s economic conditions are forcing organizations to reduce expenditures in a number of areas. Contact centers are no exception.
While contact centers have made considerable progress in being seen as a profit center rather than merely a cost center, they still face pressure to perform better, quicker and more effectively. They are being told to do more with less, including reducing cost per call while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As contact center leaders review budgets, one item stands out – any money spent on training must lead to measurable improvement in the customer experience and the overall efficiency of the center. They are carefully re-thinking the way they spend money on training and looking for methods that give them the biggest bang for their buck.
However, reducing the amount of money and time spent on training can prove disastrous for an organization. Today’s customers are savvier and more demanding than ever. And customer service agents are the company’s frontline, interacting closely with customers and extending the company’s brand. This frontline team needs to be prepared to address rising customer expectations and deliver on the company’s brand.
Marnee Downing, call center director at aigdirect.com has seen the effects firsthand. She said, “There’s a definite risk that cutting training budgets will affect customer loyalty. Training departments themselves have been so squeezed that they’re running themselves ragged.”
Art Hall, management consultant at Alvarez & Marsal, agreed. “Unfortunately, contact center budgets are being cut left and right, but that hub of the organization speaks to more customers than any other line of business. It’s an oxymoron. Training is being cut, but training is what empowers the agents to deliver the right information at the right time to provide high-quality customer service.”
What’s a contact center to do? Clearly, it’s all about training smarter.
Finding Inventive Ways to Improve Customer Experience
A company can change its pricing and develop strategic plans to improve performance and stay competitive. But at the end of the day, a company’s success is driven by the customer experience and their view of the organization – which is driven by the view they receive at the frontline.
To put it into perspective, executives are lucky if they have contact with a customer once a week. But an average agent interacts with customers 100 times per day. The experience they provide must be extraordinary to ensure customers come back.
To help agents provide better service, some leading organizations are getting creative with ways to make the most of their training dollars. And the frontline team is definitely the focus of these training initiatives.
Microsoft is one such example. It is training employees to recognize customers’ different communication styles, based on the “Color Code” method by Dr. Taylor Hartman. By utilizing the knowledge of different personality and communication preferences, both in themselves and the customers, the agents can improve the way they deliver service.
Similarly, Key Bank has trained its frontline team to get from “Good to Great” based on the book by Jim Collins that asks the question, “Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?”
However, the jury is still out on if and how these methods enhance the customer experience.
Focusing Training in the Right Places.
Microsoft’s investment of showing agents how to connect with their customers is savvy. Far too many contact centers focus training heavily on systems and product knowledge, as opposed to “soft skills,” otherwise known as customer service and conversation skills.
While systems and product knowledge are typically the easiest to be learned, proficiency in these areas doesn’t automatically equate to the ability to deliver quality customer service.
This was made clear by the American Bankers Association (ABA) research study that interviewed 300 call centers, asking them how they allocated their training resources. The ABA found that companies spent:
• 60 percent on systems training
• 30 percent on product knowledge
• 10 percent on “soft skills.”
But in the final analysis, they found that customers were, in general, pleased with agents’ product knowledge and how they appeared to enter and retrieve information from their systems. However, they were frustrated with the agents’ lack of effective customer service skills.
The fact is that frontline agents are trained on their company’s products, services, policies, procedures and technology, but they often fall short on knowing what to do with all that information when they’re handling a call attempting to solve a customer’s problem. This shortcoming directly correlates to increased customer dissatisfaction.
Today’s Customer Expectations are Through the Roof – How Do You Meet Them?
One of the most pressing challenges facing organizations today is how to effectively meet customer expectations. Unlike in days past, today’s customers are able to go online to solve their own issues. Before they buy, they are able to thoroughly research the product or service. They’re surfing the Internet, reaching out though instant messaging and connecting with other customers through social media like blogs. They want information, and they want it now!
More than 80 percent of calls are infused with some level of emotion. Customers are frustrated, angry, concerned, upset or nervous when they pick up the phone because they weren’t able to find the answer through other channels. Pity the poor agent – and the reputation of the company overall – who isn’t up for the challenge.
“Customers today are hyper-sensitive,” said Art Hall. “And with Web 2.0, a customer has the power to influence other customers positively or negatively about a particular experience they’ve had. If we don’t train our agents and empower them with the right information, that customer is going to do research, interact with other customers, form opinions – and ‘blow that agent and company out of the water’ if they don’t have the right information.”
The answer lies in empowering the agents through training.
Make Training More Effective by Considering Learning Styles
For training to be effective, it needs to match up with how agents learn. The younger generation of customer service agents is no different than today’s customers. Consider what they do in their spare time: they are surfing the Internet, text messaging and playing Wii, to name a few. This highly interactive style of living translates into a highly interactive style of learning.
Downing has seen it firsthand. “I’ve been with the organization for 25 years and there has been a definite change in learning style. You’ve got a generation that grew up on video games and DVDs. They’re used to instantaneous everything,” she said.
Training methods acceptable 10 years ago aren’t as successful with this new generation of learners who like to be totally engaged, stimulated and challenged. They don’t respond well to learning solely by the lecture-style training of the past.
To get the most out of training, it should be engaging, interactive and enable agents to learn at their own pace. It also should be a safe place where they can practice, make mistakes, get feedback and make changes.
Matching the Right Training Method to the Right Objective
There are numerous methods an organization can use to best meet the changing needs of the customer, the organization and the agents. Below are some of the methods being successfully used today.
On-Demand Learning
On-demand learning enables large numbers of agents to be effectively and rapidly trained even if they are dispersed locally, nationally or around the world. Much of this self-directed learning is taking place in the field rather than in a training environment.
The benefits of on-demand learning are that it is available:
• Just in time
• When an agent or organization needs it
• In the format an agent needs.
Plus, it frequently requires fewer training resources.
For on-demand learning to work, it needs to be interactive and engaging so it holds the agens’ attention and provides adequate opportunity to learn and practice the targeted skills. This method is best suited to help agents refresh and refine their knowledge and skills. It effectively communicates updates on a company’s products, services policies, procedures and systems and reinforces training previously conducted. However, just providing 15 minutes between calls isn’t the most effective way to train complex customer conversation skills.
Simulation-Based e-Learning
One of the most effective ways to learn those crucial customer conversation skills is by doing. A simulation-based e-Learning environment allows individuals to learn by doing, make mistakes, get feedback, learn the impact of their effective or ineffective use of the skills and then try again. It helps them learn how to use the right word choices at the right time to create a better conversation.
With this training method, agents can develop both the competence and confidence needed to deliver consistent quality service without jeopardizing valuable customer relationships by practicing on actual customers. It also focuses on building confidence, taking ownership of each call and using the right word choices. All of this helps breed corporate brand consistency.
“Role playing in a safe, simulated environment is important, said Marnee Downing. “The experiential part of it is key in ingraining new behaviors. Agents are able to practice and use the skills they learned.”
Remote and Distance Learning
Many companies have a growing population of employees who either work from home or at a remote location. To enable them to learn their jobs, it’s more conducive to train them in the same work environment that they will do their jobs. Remote learning also works well from a scheduling perspective.
Facilitated Classroom Training
Surprising, facilitated classroom training is still a core part of training today. Facilitation should be approximately 20 to 30 percent of the training an organization conducts, because employees still need the human contact. They need to be able to have face-time with managers to ask questions, hear others’ opinions and testimonials and network with fellow employees. Facilitation also allows agents to voice any concerns they have about barriers to applying the skills they’ve learned.
What Kind of Training is Best?
One size of training won’t fit all organizations. Contact centers need a combination of methods to ensure an effective learning environment, based on their objectives and the way that their agents learn.
A good way to gauge if a company’s training mix is effective is to look at:
1. Follow-up surveys with the agents that asks how they liked the training
2. If the agents were able to transfer the skills back to the job
3. If the training changed the contact center’s performance and customer ratings over time.
If the answers are “yes,” the contact center found the right mix. If not, they need to further explore how their agents learn best.
But no matter what type of training method it selects, a contact center’s training is only as good as the content it uses. The training should contain content that has been validated. Validation shows the impact of applying discrete conversation skills on the overall outcome of the call, so the organization gets proven results.
The Not-So-Secret Way to Ensure Training Success.
There’s been recent chatter in the industry about a study that concluded that companies should stop conducting agent training because of a lack of return on investment. But that study didn’t link to the agent training the one crucial element to ensure that training works: coaching.
Training has a significant return when coupled with the coaching process. Coaching needs to be provided from someone at the management level, whom the agent is accountable to for job performance.
“Behavior rewarded is behavior repeated,” is the mantra of Sharon Q. Ellis, Ulysses master coach and president of SQE Communications Group. “You need to reward a specific behavior when it’s done well in order for an agent to repeat it. If you ignore it, you’ll continue to see the undesirable behaviors. That’s why coaching makes all the difference,” she said.
Art Hall concurs, “If coaching is delivered in a safe, constructive environment, it helps an agent become more proficient.”
Coaching Pays Off: A Real- Life Example
Marnee Downing’s own experience validates the role coaching plays in a training program. At 21st Century, two contact center sites embarked on an agent training program. After the training, one contact center experienced a significant reduction in employee attrition. Meanwhile, the other site saw high attrition.
“Coaching and taking care of your employees leads to less attrition, which we can definitely tie to better service and happier customers,” said Downing.
The only variable was coaching. The contact center that enjoyed the gains in customer satisfaction embraced coaching as a way to reinforce the training – and clearly, saw a return on investment on its training expenditures.
Five steps to creating a winning coaching culture.
1. Provide timely coaching within a reasonable time after the call.
2. Focus on one specific, pivotal behavior to ensure the greatest impact.
3. Provide constructive and focused feedback.
4. Provide the feedback consistently with dependable follow-up.
5. Provide accountability by having a supervisor– someone whom the agent reports to – conduct the coaching.
Marnee Downing summed the changing face of training by saying, “With training and coaching, it’s a heavy upfront cost, but organizations will either pay now or pay later. If you skimp on training, you’ll just pay later.”
“You may pay more later in terms of employee attrition, customer churn, or even worse, customer badmouth, which is even harder to combat with today’s social media,” she said. “And just like with a credit card, it’s always more expensive to pay later.”
