At Call Experts, we invest in employee training. In our fast-paced ever-changing world, a call center needs to keep pace or they will be at risk of getting left behind. We understand the need for a business to stay relevant and are dedicated to investing in our employees to ensure that we have a strong team to support the needs of our customers.
An overview of our program
For each new team member, it begins with New Hire Orientation.
We spend an intensive 2 weeks covering 60 hours of material with each newly hired agent. During this time, we use a blended approach of the classroom, eLearning, and scenario-based training methods to prepare the new agent to successfully join our Operations team. Our focus is to teach how to provide the ultimate customer experience for your customers, striving for the same experience they would get if they were to call your office.
For the new team member, training doesn’t end on graduation day.
And yes, we really do have graduations after each successful New Hire Orientation class to celebrate their accomplishments! The employee training continues with 3 weeks of on-the-job coaching, Quality Assurance monitoring, and regular feedback sessions with their trainers and leadership. This additional learning helps the new agents grow into their role and build on the experience they gained during their initial orientation.
At roughly 45 days of employment, we begin the process of up-training our agents to handle calls and situations that are more complex. This employee training follows the same blended approach of the classroom, eLearning, and scenario-based training. It is also followed up with testing that targets information retention and practical application of topics and skills learned by each agent.
Customer needs influence curriculum
At Call Experts, we are focused on customer success and work closely with our customers to ensure a clear understanding of their needs and expectations.
Our training team is involved in some of the earliest stages of this customer onboarding, allowing us to understand what customers need and turning it into an actionable curriculum and training for our teams.
Depending on the size and complexity of the customer’s call requirements, this training is done via classroom or eLearning. Regardless of the method, we conduct scenario-based practice calls with additional testing to ensure that your customer experience is seamless when you “go-live” with our agents.
Training for all
While having a well-trained front line is a big piece to the overall quality puzzle, it’s important to make sure our leadership team has a focus on the continued growth and development of their own skills.
We invest in our leadership team by offering up to 16 hours of leadership training for all newly promoted management level staff. Once completed, we provide a monthly continued education curriculum focused on areas like:
- providing impactful coaching
- providing helpful feedback
- how to recognize employees that are disengaging and how to reengage them in the workplace
- de-escalation techniques for calls that eventually require Supervisor intervention
In addition, we hold regular Quality Assurance calibrations with all of our management teams to guarantee that we are listening for, grading and coaching those specific aspects of a call that lead to a seamless, enjoyable experience for all of your callers.
Our investment in training ensures that we have a staff that is highly skilled to handle a diversity of unique call types with a focus on providing a high level of service on each call we take.
This blog post was written by Mark Hansen. Mark Hansen is the Director of Training and Development at Call Experts based in Charleston, South Carolina. For more information on how our services can help your business build efficiency with expert training, please contact him at info@callexperts.com.
