Employee training, anyone who has had a job has gone through it and ask a handful of people about their experience with employee training and you’re likely to get a negative recollection of how boring it was. 

But it’s easier than you think to make courses more focused, engage learners, and positively influence behaviors. And employees who are engaged in their training will retain more information, are more likely to pay close attention to their work, ensure that all procedures and processes are being properly followed and that they are performing to the best of their abilities.

In this article we’ll provide you with a step by step guide to create high-quality, engaging training courses that employees can reminisce about fondly. We'll cover establishing your learning aims and objectives, designing your training session, and preparing the content. We'll define what learning aims and objectives are while differentiating the two. We'll go over method of delivery, how to put your objectives into logical order and structure your training session, how to choose your content, resources and activities.

And How to Prepare Agents for the Job

The days of the call center, a center where service to customers over the phone alone is handled, is long gone. In the early 2000s centers slowly started expanding the number of channels and started calling themselves contact centers. This trend continued and the number of channels continued to grow, turning contact centers into multi-channel centers where customers can choose to get in touch with companies using the channel of their preference.

How one agent can make a substantial difference

Research has shown that the main reason customers choose not to return is not because of pricing or product issues. Most customers don't return due to poor service. Your frontline agents can make all the difference. They can give every single customer a reason to return.

Sound like a lot of power? Well, it is.

The Trusted T.A.C.O.S. Model for Contact Center Trainers.

The lasting reputation and ultimate sustainability of any organization rests heavily on the shared efforts of every agent on the call floor. If half-hearted, unfocused efforts are the peak of the customer care on offer, contact centers and the organizations financially supporting their existence can, and have, crumbled overnight.

It’s a crowded global marketplace out there, bursting at the seams with consumers who each have very different requirements, at different times, via different support channels. With that in mind, many organizations still strongly believe that it's as impossible to make a sweeping generalization about what every single customer expects than it is to sneeze with your eyes open.

Working from home provides agents with the ability to perform the tasks they’d usually perform on a contact center floor, in the comfort of their own homes. As home agents communicate with telephone customers, respond to questions on social media, and answer email queries, many still question their focus, in their absence from the physical call floor.

Agent training shouldn’t stop as soon as the new-hire orientation and initial training period is complete. Contact center training is an ongoing evolutionary process. The goal of any contact center’s ongoing training program is to provide training for the skills necessary to perform the job, plus training for skills necessary to enhance ongoing performance.

The rise in e-learning popularity is showing no signs of slowing any time in the near future. It’s rapidly changing the way we look at knowledge and skill acquisition and provides students with a much more impressive, and more effective, learning experience than ever before. Seems like a perfect addition to any contact center.

At some point since 1989, most of us have gazed and pondered in amazement at the futuristic expectation of 2015 depicted in the 1989 blockbuster classic Back to the Future II. While the then seemingly absurd predictions of Biometric technology, video communication, mounted flat-screen TVs, and video glasses are today a spookily accurate reality, absolutely no predictions were ever made about how users will embrace a rich e-learning experience across multiple devices. It’s time to bin any secret obsessions of hoverboards and self-tying shoelaces, because 2015 is the year of responsive e-learning design!

Everyone agrees that training is vital in enabling your agents to achieve their full potential. But what is the best medium for delivering that training? The ideal scenario is to have high quality at a low cost - but is that possible?