With increasing numbers of customers and prospects picking up the phone looking for reassurance, advice and support, call centres need to focus on providing best in class experiences. 84% of customers would be less likely to return to a brand after a poor customer call experience, according to our Moments That Matter survey, and almost half of those surveyed say they experienced at least one poor call experience in the last six months.
This means it’s absolutely vital that agents receive comprehensive and data-driven training. With many businesses leaders looking to drive efficiencies and savings across the board, now is the time to develop a killer call centre agent training programme that will ensure your contact centres are prepped and ready to handle increasing volumes of calls.
Get ready to give yourself a truly competitive advantage in your contact centres. In this blog, we’ll share four top tips to help you develop winning call centre agent training programmes.
What is call centre agent training and why is it important?
Call centre agent training involves creating a set of resources and scripts to prepare your agents for the challenges and responsibilities of dealing with customers every day. The purpose of call centre agent training is to make them feel knowledgeable, supported and confident in their day-to-day interactions with customers and leads.
Providing comprehensive on-boarding training, and ongoing training, is important for your call centre agents as it enables fantastic customer experiences in the contact centre. If everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet, your customers receive consistently excellent service, and your agents feel empowered to handle calls efficiently.
What benefits will a call centre agent training programme bring?
In addition to enhancing the customer experience, the benefits of creating a five-star call centre agent training programme include:
- Better agent performance
- Improved contact centre efficiencies
- Stronger reputation
- Increased customer satisfaction and trust
- Reduced agent churn
- Increased revenue from your contact centre
Tips to create a five-star call centre agent training programme
1. Align training with business objectives
The first step in creating a winning call centre agent training programme is to give your agents a sense of purpose, by aligning your training with business objectives. If your agents understand why they are doing things a particular way, they’re better able to draw clear links between their actions and overarching goals, enabling them to remain focused on activities – and calls – that move the dial.
Call monitoring software, like Conversation Analytics, can help you align training by automatically scoring and logging calls that led to desired business-aligned outcomes. For example, if driving purchases over the phone is most important to you, use Conversation Analytics to identify the words or phrases associated with a purchase and log the calls, so you can draw on them later to provide real-time training and enhance scripts.
2. Develop training materials based on real calls
Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster and develop winning scripts. Call monitoring can help you engineer more satisfying customer conversations by highlighting common pain points that cause frustration and tailoring your agent scripts to deliver solutions before they escalate.
With tools such as Agent ID, you can assess individual agent performance, understand where you could improve the customer experience, and isolate calls that are significantly better at upselling to gather learnings that can be shared across your call centre. These insights will help you uncover the best calls to use for script development deliver exceptional customer experiences without putting more pressure on your agents.
3. Teach upselling and cross-selling skills
The ability to upsell and cross-sell in contact centres is hugely valuable, and it’s worth building this into your call centre agent training programme. 77% of agents say they are nearly always able to upsell and cross-sell when resolving support requests, which means effectively capitalising on these opportunities can increase revenues, without fielding dozens of extra calls and increasing workload.
If you want to implement these skills in your training programme, call monitoring software can be incredibly useful. By automatically monitoring and logging call outcomes at scale, you can track purchase trends over time, highlight common pain points to deliver solutions, and learn how to deflect low-quality calls to focus on real revenue opportunities.
4. Focus on continuous learning at all levels
It’s not enough to quickly on-board new agents and throw them to the wolves. Continuous learning will help your call agents feel engaged, supported and confident in their work. This is important, as it will boost morale, reduce agent churn and prime them to provide exceptional customer experiences. According to research, experienced call centre agents received an average of six days of training every year.
Call monitoring tools like Conversation Analytics that can monitor and log call outcomes automatically at scale can show you trends or common mistakes that you can build into your agent training programme. Plus, features such as Agent ID can show you what makes your high-flying agents fly so high by replacing guesswork with clear insights. Use Agent ID to understand what went well (and what didn’t) on individual calls, and provide tailored training regularly. This will help you transform team performance from ‘good’ to ‘great’, and how to fuel better decision-making and processes in your contact centre.
How Conversation Analytics can enhance your call agent training
Call tracking and speech analytics are a match made in call centre heaven. Call tracking can supercharge call centre performance by providing real-time data on where calls are coming from, to better understand where and why customers pick up the phone. If you can pinpoint the action that triggers customer calls, you can tailor scripts using high-quality transcripts and deliver call centre agent training that will drive more successful outcomes.
When you pair call tracking with Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, you can take things to the next level. With both solutions, you can get the insights you need to map your customer journey, improve customer service and streamline operations. Benefits of implementing call monitoring software include:
- Identify the keywords that persuade customers to convert in the moment and use these to improve your call centre scripts.
- Engineer more satisfying customer conversations by highlighting common pain points that are likely to cause frustration and deliver solutions.
- Train your call agents more effectively with tried-and-tested scripts that are guaranteed to deliver more satisfying call outcomes.
- Improve upselling and reduce churn by identifying needs and solutions before your customer even thinks of them.
When you combine Conversation Analytics with Agent ID, you can gain actionable insights into how well individual agents are handling the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are. Plus, Conversation Analytics integrates seamlessly with many contact centre technologies and CRM systems, allowing you to harness rich data automatically and draw links between calls and outcomes.
A great example of this comes from automotive dealership group Pendragon. They used Conversation Analytics were to pinpoint every call where key terms were used, along with additional clarifiers like where in the call they were spoken, or their proximity to other terms. This enabled them to reduce their CPA by 63%, drive a 30% decrease in unanswered calls, and reduce common friction points across branches by 66%.
Want to find out more about how to take your contact centre to the next level? Start a conversation with us today about Agent ID and Conversation Analytics.
