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.

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.