How eLearning Solves Your Contact Centre’s Training Challenges

Jennifer Waite at Playvox explains how eLearning solves your contact centre’s training challenges.

If your contact centre doesn’t have effective eLearning capabilities, you’re missing an opportunity to optimize agent performance.

One of the biggest training challenges contact centres face is keeping agents’ skills sharp following onboarding. New hire training is typically thorough enough to get agents up and running, but what about ongoing training that reinforces skills and keeps contact centre agents aligned with business goals?

Unfortunately, ongoing training is often short-changed. It’s challenging to pull agents off phone and digital queues for training. Service levels could suffer, and besides, training costs money.

But by short-changing training, contact centres are doing agents and customers a disservice. A recent Salesforce study revealed that 55% of agents believe they need better training in order to perform their job responsibilities well.

As one of our recent webinar presenters put it, “No matter how big the meal, I’ll still be hungry tomorrow.” For many of us, the appetite for learning is never quite satisfied.

When agents aren’t proficient in soft and technical skills, customer interactions suffer. Plus, inadequately trained agents can add unnecessary costs through higher handle times and lower first contact resolutions.

On demand eLearning can help contact centres avoid these pitfalls by enabling them to train agents anytime and anywhere, even during idle time between interactions.

What Is Contact Centre eLearning?

eLearning, or electronic learning, is a method of delivering training digitally. While it used to include older media, such as CD-ROMs, today’s eLearning is delivered online and frequently referred to as online training or online learning.

Employees can access eLearning materials through devices such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

The best contact centre learning management systems enable multimedia eLearning, which means agents can learn skills from:

• Videos
• eBooks
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Slide decks
• Articles
• Livestream instructor-led training

ELearning can be at least as effective as classroom training, but it’s cheaper, more scalable, and can quickly reach employees around the globe.

How Does eLearning Solve the Challenge of Ongoing Training?

ELearning helps organizations overcome many of the barriers of classroom-based call centre agent training.

On-Demand

Executing ongoing classroom training can be a scheduling nightmare, especially if your call centre is open 24/7.

In large contact centres, it can take dozens of classroom sessions to train all agents from all shifts without sacrificing service levels. The on-demand nature of eLearning eliminates this complex scheduling task by enabling agents to complete training when volume allows.

Available to Everyone

Remote agents also create a dilemma when it comes to traditional call centre agent training. How do you deliver classroom training to agents located 500 miles from your centre? eLearning solves this problem because it only requires an internet connection to access.

With so many contact centres shifting to a remote or hybrid workforce model, eLearning is a must-have to train agents. Plus, it provides equal access to development opportunities.

Microlearning

Microlearning sessions are typically ten minutes or less. One study showed that microlearning can improve knowledge retention and speed up the learning process. Short segments of on-demand training are a perfect solution for busy contact centres.

Supervisors can use their judgment about the best time to pull agents off queues so they can spend ten minutes learning about a relevant topic.

These qualities make ongoing training much more accessible to contact centre agents everywhere. Plus, eLearning is a cost-effective training solution. Considering the potential improvements to CX and efficiency, a contact centre learning management system can have a very attractive ROI.

Other Benefits of Providing Ongoing Training Through eLearning

Career development is important to most workers and can affect employee satisfaction and loyalty. If contact centres are able to provide more training due to eLearning capabilities, it can make it easier to recruit and retain agents and improve employee engagement.

Let’s look at some statistics that illustrate the power of continuous training:

• Almost 90% of Millennials rate professional development and career growth opportunities as very important
• 96% of employees would stay with an employer longer if it invested in their training and development
• Businesses that invest in employee development are 11% more profitable and twice as likely to retain employees

Forward-looking organizations recognize these benefits and are making employee development a priority. Salesforce found that 73% of businesses are making substantial investments in agent training.

Those investments likely include learning management systems with eLearning functionality. Easily accessible, self-paced training is the right solution for today’s digital workforce.

What to Look for in a Contact Centre eLearning Solution

Look for the following capabilities when selecting your eLearning solution.

Personalized Curriculums

There’s a reason personalization enhances the customer experience. Employ the same tactics to improve the agent experience by sending customized training content to agents that will address their specific learning needs.

Embedded Quizzes

Measuring the effectiveness of call centre agent training is essential anytime, but especially when you use eLearning. Embedded quizzes provide learning checks and deliver quick learning-related insights to supervisors.

Live Streaming

Classroom training can certainly play an important role in how organizations train agents. Good eLearning solutions can extend these in-person sessions virtually through live stream and include functionality that enables remote agents to communicate with the instructor.

Management Oversight

A self-paced approach to training requires strong management tools. Look for a solution that allows supervisors to see quiz scores and whether agents have accessed specific training content.

Tie Training to Performance Results

The true test of training effectiveness is its impact on performance. The ideal learning management solution can integrate with other contact centre systems to let leaders easily see if training is having the desired results.

Author: Jennifer Waite