Remote work isn’t the future. It’s the present. With more at-home agents today, your service teams need training now more than ever. That’s why The Call Center School has created its first e-book, “Agents at Home: How to Start Your Online Training Program.”

This free guide will help you get started with remote training. It features insights if you want to take your curriculum online or wish to create new courses on-the-fly. You’ll learn:

• How to select the right training format for your learning objectives
• What types of technologies are available for you and your remote team
• The easiest, most cost-effective way to move your curriculum online
• How to create an e-learning video class

Working from home has many benefits. You have a flexible schedule, zero commuting, and more time with loved ones. But it also has its drawbacks, especially for your frontline agents. Most remote employees face challenges. Agents may face these doubly since they often deal with customer problems, too.

You or your boss have come up with a great plan: “let’s make an e-learning training ourselves!” Enthusiasm is high and the do-it-yourself mindset is very empowering. But how do you get started if this is your first time creating e-learning from scratch? Here are 3 steps that will help you make your e-learning a reality.

Companies and teams are adapting to many changes today. Whether you are staffing up, skilling up or keeping up, The Call Center School is ready to help you. We are now offering professional services for companies that need custom e-learning solutions.

Your commitment to customer experience has led you to hire more remote staff to keep up with your demand. Bravo! Now, what? If you relied on in-person or group training sessions in the past, you may face challenges today.

New hires help you in the long run, but they can take up a lot of your short-term bandwidth. Experienced employees, who were once the go-to people, may not be available to help train. These employees may have time constraints or critical work to do.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, contact centers are facing new challenges each day. Your customer volumes are fluctuating. Your agent availability may have decreased. If you’re new to at-home work, your team’s productivity may be waning. How do you adapt to these volatile times while still focusing on customer experience? One short answer: skill up.

There are many reasons why you’d want to skill up. You may want to train your employees with a backup skill, so they can pitch in when volumes are high. There may be new demand for a specific channel (like social or live chat) that you may need to train for. After all, introducing new or redundant skills among your agents is more cost-effective than hiring.

At The Call Center School, we create engaging e-learning courses for training contact center employees (for frontline agents, supervisor, quality assurance, and workforce management). With the current outbreak of the coronavirus, contact centers face an entire new set of challenges. To prevent a further outbreak and protect their employees, many centers have quickly moved to remote work scenarios. This, however, can be challenging for employees that are not used to working from home.

To support the contact center community during these challenging times, we have put together a free e-learning course on remote work for contact center employees. In just 20 minutes, this course helps prepare your employees to work from home. It covers the advantages, challenges, and best practices for remote contact center work.

How do I gain mastery? Have you ever asked yourself this question when thinking about your job? Especially when one is new to a particular area, we all wish to acquire all the necessary skills as quickly as possible. However, gaining mastery is not something that you achieve overnight. Instead, it is about learning and practicing, over and over again, for months and often years.

Think of a pianist. In order to become highly skilled in playing the piano, ongoing training and practice are fundamental. Proper initial training, that teaches the basic techniques of piano playing, is important, but it is far from sufficient to master the instrument. A good pianist trains regularly and practices each new piano piece many times before presenting it to an audience.

In this day and age, we are used to communicating through short text messages in real-time. We are connecting with our friends and loved ones via SMS text, iMessage, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and thousands of other apps. So it should come as no surprise that the popularity of customer service via live chat is increasing.

Customers value the quick, on-point service that is delivered while they can keep on working on other tasks at the same time.

For contact centers it is effective because it saves time, labor, and money. Agents can handle multiple customer requests at the same time, the communication is short and not as repetitive as emails, so that customers can get an instant response to their questions. 

Social Media has been adopted, by and large. Whether or not you’re an avid tweeter or adding to your Instagram story daily, it’s safe to say social media is here to stay. What does this mean for businesses? Well, most companies today have embraced social media platforms for marketing purposes, and that’s great! But, if your business fails to acknowledge social media as more than a promotional platform, you may really want to reconsider. 

At The Call Center School, we are seeing more of our clients turning to support their customers on social media platforms every day. And it’s no wonder why, with social media outlets just a click away, customers have more power and influence than ever before. With this power, many would prefer to add a quick post on your company’s Facebook page than wait on hold to talk to someone in your service center. What’s more, is the public nature of these social platforms and the impact one negative post can have on your company’s image.