Work From Home – 4 Most Effective Ways To Train Contact Center Agents
Customer expectations for great customer service are rapidly evolving and training agents to align with them brings huge benefits. Ever since the pandemic season rearranged the workplace, many started to Work From Home (WFH) with breathtaking speed. Keeping contact center agents on task and productive — as more and more people WFH– is difficult. It’s true for the work from home agents who are also moms. They
need to babysit their babies while working or taking care of their kid’s needs but it’s not impossible.
Recent research from Harvard Business Review states that COVID-19 may have shut offices, but the long-term effects might be just as profound, as 74 percent of businesses plan on reducing the number of employees in their office, even after the virus subsides.Your company can’t afford to go unprepared. More companies had to shift their businesses online but not all have the necessary infrastructure in place.
Most of them go cloud as it offers increased scalability and flexibility in the long run. Let’s explore further how you can train contact center agents while working from home.
1. Identify underlying performance issues
Leaders should analyze an agent’s performance in quality assurance forms to identify any trends. These forms will show whether an agent consistently receives low or failing scores in particular metrics or from call monitoring data for a particular call type. Leadership should also determine if there are multiple issues such as lack of communication skills, problems adhering to processes, accessing customer data, and processing transactions.
2. Review key performance indicators
If management finds that multiple work-from-home agents are failing in the same contact center metrics, it might be time to revisit them. Average Handling Time (AHT) is one of the KPI that businesses may need to address. If AHT is too short, agents may be rushing callers off the phone to meet their goals. Customers will also often end up with unresolved issues and are forced to call again.
If AHT is too long, there will be longer wait times for customers. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may be due to new or upgraded business products that customers need assistance with, technical difficulties that require more time on the phone, or focus on a first-call resolution.
3. Communicate with agents
Depending on the structure of an organization, either the quality assurance manager or the contact center manager should discuss the performance issues with the agent. Management should begin by making sure that the agent understands the quality evaluation metrics and how calls are scored.
The assessment must be constructive and include recognition of both the agent’s strengths and performance opportunities by involving great collaboration tools and data analytics. Management should then review the action plan with the agent to provide help and support.
4. Provide consistent feedback and reinforcement
The most effective training programs provide continuous and encouraging feedback to motivate contact center agents. When an agent struggles to perform while working from home, it’s a good idea to offer the agent some extra attention. A cloud-based contact center empowers your agents to deliver the best possible customer experience, wherever your customers are and for them to reach you 24/7.
Management should conduct routine evaluations of the agent’s calls and provide timely feedback, and when needed, provide additional targeted coaching sessions that address the agent’s specific needs.
If you want to create an action plan, look no further than the Work-From-Home cloud solution as it’s more cost-effective, flexible, scalable and encourages a ton of omnichannel strategies for your seamless customer journey now and soon. Contact center managers could even monitor agents performances in real-time and review SLA reports. We worked with prominent global and local CRM partners and hosted contact centers on Google or Alibaba Cloud. Just imagine a cost reduced cloud solution that can be accessed anywhere and anytime plus add value to your business.
Source: https://searchcustomerexperience.techtarget.com/answer/5-ways-to-improve-call-center-agent-performance
