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.