Modern Customer Service Demands Modern Customer Service Training And Onboarding - Not Classrooms

When we describe the flexibility of how the yoummday talents (our term for customer service agents) work, there is a common response from the traditional customer service community. They always believe that their team must be better trained because they are located together in a physical contact center and they can focus more attention on training them.

As you might expect, our talents and management disagree with this view. Most contact centres need to recruit the entire team all over again each year just to stand still - because everyone quits. Does this sound like an environment where everyone is happy with their training and their job?

The flexibility we offer our talents allows them to deliver a far better customer experience because they are happier working from home, selecting their own working hours, and selecting the brands they support. We do also offer them industry-leading support and training.

It all starts with the 100-day plan. It’s part of our onboarding process, but it goes beyond basic training to ensure that people have contacts in the business they can talk to.

We start out with a meet and greet session, assigning a buddy to each person, defining work plans over the first week or so, shadowing the buddy for at least 3 sessions, then creating coaching sessions in the first month that focus on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are important for the client.

Then we offer ongoing support. Our curriculum includes optional training that is available to everyone - soft skills such as sales or communication, tools like Excel and PowerPoint, and coaching in areas like resilience.

Our modular AI framework can then help team members to learn from others. For example, we can study calls using AI and breakdown the Average Handle Time (AHT) into sections automatically. By matching the most successful calls, where the customer is satisfied, with the approach taken by the agent we can advise on the most successful approach in real-time. It’s like having a digital coach that is always offering advice based on how everyone on the team is performing.

We also work closely with our clients to design training materials that help them deliver the most important information to talents as easily as possible. This usually starts out as simple documents and PDFs, but then can include interactivity, gamification, and personalized learning. We use gamification across all our training modules because it encourages the talents to keep exploring and keep learning. They might not need a specific skill immediately, but it could help them in future.

Each client gets a ring-fenced learning environment so the client area is branded and protected from the main production environment. This allows talents to try their skills and and follow guided learning plans that are specific for each client.

We also believe that our system of blended learning - where some learning requires supervisors or peers and some is self-managed - offers enormous flexibility for the learner. The talents can work on their training plan 24/7 when it suits them. They have an engaging experience and their progress is visible, so they always know what has been achieved and how far there is to go.

This type of learning is also consistent - we can be sure that all the talents are seeing the same training materials in the same way. It also scales up. We can train 100 or 1,000 agents using the same system. Our AI Assist module can help the individual team member to focus on areas they need to work on.

Once talents are productive they have a personal scorecard that reflects measures such as productivity, sales, and quality. This can be matched to the training plan so where there are any knowledge gaps, they can be addressed before they become problematic.

We believe that our blended onboarding and training plan is actually one of the best in the industry. Don’t be fooled by the traditional contact centres who insist on more traditional training plans - this is the future. After all, when you are learning a new language would you prefer the gamified environment of Duolingo or a cold classroom with a teacher repeating verb conjugation?