You know that feeling where everyone is watching you, and you don’t feel prepared? We’ve heard that from contact center trainers and trainees a lot over the past year. From the trainer’s perspective, new hires are less engaged and aren’t “getting it” quick enough, and they do not have the resource to provide the 1:1 support new hires need. As a result, they activate before they are ready, increasing customer frustration and new hire frustration; attrition rises, starting the process all over again. From the trainee’s perspective, they arrive anxious and excited to learn, and working remotely means less support to understand how to apply what they are learning. They feel like they are put in front of customers underprepared and scared they may lose their job because they underperform and feel isolated.
With the increased demands, Covid thrust upon contact center organizations, SymTrain, in conjunction with CCNG, sponsored a survey on the impact of converting to remote work. The survey of managers and executives responsible for training revealed a mad rush to deploy technology, with 68% of respondents investing in better training delivery via virtual and collaboration meeting tools and 30% investing in better eLearning utilization. Unfortunately, reaching trainees better gets you halfway there; leaving the burden of applying training to real-world scenarios in the hands of our new hires left to figure out how to perform better.
The survey results led to this white paper on the 5 Reasons Performance-Based Training In Contact Centers Requires Automation. For trainees to avoid learning on the job, organizations have historically invested in 1:1 mentoring and role-play activities so that they can get as close to real-world experience as possible. However, with remote work, it is harder to provide enough support without significant impact on:
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Taking our best folks “off the floor.”
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Providing consistent feedback across subject matter experts & trainers, and most important.
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It’s not scalable — and with the increased demand for remote agents supporting an ever-growing online economy, that’s important.
Recently, contact centers have begun deploying new levels of automation that drive customer interactions. These same technologies can now empower trainees to learn at their own pace and get immediate feedback on their performance, leveraging the latest in voice recognition to deliver conversational simulations or simulating online website customer interactions.
Sixty percent of survey respondents cited the need to improve the performance of remote workers, and by using automation to simulate real-world environments, they can do this at scale. With increasing situational repetition and delivering consistent feedback across all trainees, trainers can now pinpoint where more coaching is needed to save countless hours of learning too late and validate when trainees are ready to interact with customers. This relieves your best performers from having to take time off from interacting with customers.
Performance-based training with automation saves time and resources and can eliminate the anxiety of being underprepared and restore satisfaction with better job performance and results.
Dan McCann is CEO and Chief Learning Officer at SymTrain – a CCNG Corporate Member.
