Call Centre Training and Development

© 2012 Laurence Carter. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/19/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-9167-2 (e)

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Contents

Chapter 1 Call Centre Training and Development

Chapter 2 Training Process

Chapter 3 Call Centre Training Programs

Chapter 4 Specialist Training Areas

Chapter 5 Support Training

Chapter 6 The Call Centre Recruitment Process

Chapter 7 Trainer Development and Evaluation

Chapter 8 Training Challenges

Overview

Call centre enterprises are faced with the challenge of delivering excellent customer service to their client programs. At the same time they are working to generate a business profit for their organisations. Call centre businesses have outsourced segments of their operations to various countries in the world as they make efforts to grow their business. In outsourcing their operations they have worked to maintain service expectations, by managing operational costs and training the workforce to the required standards that produce exceptional business results.

Call centre outsourcing has meant the use of multi-cultural workforces. In such circumstances, the call centre training and development team is responsible for producing and delivering a variety of training courses that can be effectively utilized in different global operational environments, with individuals of different cultural backgrounds.

The goal is to train call centre employees to attain the same high levels of productivity, quality and compliance across the global organisation. This calls for the appreciation of different cultures on the part of the training and development team. The training team uses their expertise and knowledge to provide cross-cultural training and development that is seamless throughout the organisation in its ability to generate the same level of work related competencies in employees regardless of their location.

Development of the global call centre workforce calls for dedication to excellent customer service and high levels of quality compliance. Training cannot just concentrate on learning outcomes, but must be oriented towards bridging the gap between learning and being effective in producing high quality operational results that drive business performance. High standards for employee performance must be nurtured in the organisation and the training and development team has to do its part to set the stage for the sustaining of a high performance culture within the organisation.

In the very competitive market for global call centre operations, training and development management should be at the forefront of the planning and execution of training programs that generate excellent business results, while ensuring learning transfer in an enriching learning environment. This book is dedicated to reviewing aspects of call centre training and development to showcase what it takes to create a world class, productive and successful global training and development program.

Chapter 1

Call Centre Training and Development

Introduction

Call centre’s or as known in some circles as contact centres, are operational offices that are set up to process customer service requests for incoming and outgoing telephone calls to and from consumers. These are usually high volume, telephone call operations, which require at times large workforces to meet the demand for calling services. In today’s market place, the handling of requests may also extend out to providing other services such as internet chat—where live chat with a customer service representative, is used to communicate with the customers.

Call centres will also conduct other back office operations to support business functions, such as the processing of e-mails, letters and faxes, which help to feed the call volume for various types of call centre operations. These back office services may be for debt collection purposes, telemarketing, accounting services, product verification or general customer care.

Some call centres are also utilizing the services of work at home agents. This continuing evolution in the way that call centres operate means that while the traditional view is to see a call centre as a fixed workplace with the associates working from that designated area, we now have to widen our view to include those persons who work from home. Even though they work at home, they are part of a larger grouping of associates operating at various levels, who service a given client contract.

Whether working from a designated call centre office or at home, the basic equipment needed for the job will include a telephone, and a computer loaded with the required client software applications. It also requires a telecommunications set up to manage the routing of calls, and internet chat to each associate for them to be able to make and receive calls, and to work using internet chat services.

Increasingly with advances in call centre technology, the telephone associates use may be a soft phone, built into client application software which would then allow calls to be made and received via the internet using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) set ups. This then eliminates the need for an actual physical telephone set up, thus helping to reduce operational costs.

With continued advances in technology as it relates to computer / telephone integration, these types of application set ups will expand in use. They allow for more cost effective management of the call centre infrastructure and call management. These innovations also improve the customer experience on the telephone or via chat services, by the increased usage of related technology to enhance the customer contact experience.

Even with advances in technology, associates have to still be able to perform their work routine in the required manner. Any call centre technology being implemented is only going to be useful if it is properly utilized by the associates using the systems. This requires effective training to get associates ready to assume their role as a call centre employee.

Call centre services are required by some businesses so that they can meet customer requests related to the sale of their products and services. This gives these businesses the ability to interact effectively with their customers. In the call centre world they are many varied business sectors, who because of the nature of their business models, processes and regulatory requirements, are mandated to provide various types of customer—business interaction via the use of call centres. This allows these businesses to effectively conduct their operations and to support their customer base in the purchase and after sales service of products and services.

Let’s look in brief at two of these business sectors to illustrate. The telecommunications industry in the United States is supported by the call centre industry. For land lines / mobile phones, fixed line and wireless internet services, companies can use call centres to offer customer and sales support for persons who have ordered phones, internet devices and the related services as well as the associated support accessories that are available for sale.

The call centres work to support the telecommunication industry, by providing call centre associates to answer customer queries as it relates to order support functions, service activations, support for product shipping services, and technical support for products and services that have been sold as well as to answer any other customer queries, that can be generated.

For those services being offered under a contractual basis by the telecommunications provider to the consumer, the call centres can offer support for payments on accounts by cheque, credit card, or e-pay services. Call centres can offer a wide range of support services to collect on monies owed to these companies, by individuals who are in various stages of indebtedness and may require some assistance to help them organise the repayment of their outstanding debt.

Call centres can also offer back office support, analysis of sales channels, management of call volume, forecasting of call volume traffic, workforce management and a whole host of support functions that can assist the telecommunications companies to offer the required level of consumer support to give them the desired business results

The second example we will examine is the United States utility sector. The US utility provision sectors are also supported by the call centre industry. In the US, the sale of the gas and electricity products in many states is regulated. Sales of the various utilities services, may be done door to door or by telemarketers and call centre operations will support the sales and telemarketing efforts, for the sale of new service connections and the transfer of service from one utility provider to another.

Since by law it has to be verified that the consumer wants to switch services between service providers, or contract for a new service, this is where call centres can provide product verification services. Associates use scripted questions to ensure that the consumer is complying with the relevant state regulations related to the sale of utility services and that consumers do indeed want to switch utility providers or install a new service under contract to the utility provider.

These are just two examples of the how organisations can use call centres in various business sectors to interact with and support their consumer bases. Call centres will generally offer inbound and outbound call handling services, as well as back office and technical support for business process services for their client programs. They may also offer e-mail and live chat support, analytical and research services as well as application development to support call management infrastructure.

In the Global world that we live in, this has also meant that many of these operations have been outsourced to other countries in order to give adequate 24hr support to their customer contact operations, in a cost effective manner. Outsourcing in the call centre industry is when businesses contract out certain aspects of their business processes to established call centre operations.

Outsourcing has grown over the years, despite pressure from countries like the US to keep many of these call centre jobs within the country. They are many operations going off-shore mainly due to efforts to lower operational costs while working to still maintain high operating standards.

The access to low labour and infrastructural costs at many of these offshore sites make them viable options for the location of call centre services. These locations have the human resources required to provide the operational expertise needed to effectively run a call centre. As a result places like India, Panama and the Philippines have seen the successful establishment of many off-shore call centre operations.

Outsourcing has not been without its challenges as it brings with it customer satisfaction issues in relation to cultural differences and the language skills of the associates who are working for the call centre in the country where operations have been outsourced. These challenges can lead to issues with the call centre’s service quality that arise because of those cultural and language differences. This can then translate into a less than satisfactory experience for the consumer over the phone.

The end result for some of these calls is that for example, American consumers out of frustration end up asking to speak to an English speaking or American representative. This is because they are having difficulties understanding the call centre associate who is on the line with them. Such service failures may be indicative of a failure of the organisational training management to prepare the call centre associates to communicate effectively across the cultural and language divide that they face when speaking to the American consumer on the phone.

This brings us to the reason why the efforts of the global training and development team are so important to the successful delivery of expected business results. They are many variations in business requirements that can be needed for a call centre operation. These standards have to be trained and developed on a global scale at outsourced call centre locations.

That is why it is important that the training and development team be fully prepared to deliver the expected training and development results that will drive excellent business performance in the global operations of a call centre organisation.

Organisational training management has to realise that in the highly competitive market for call centre contracts, they must be oriented to train and develop employees to achieve excellent business results regardless of their location. The achievement of that goal helps to market the company to potential clients, by enhancing its reputation for providing good customer service. This gives potential clients the incentive to contract with the call centre operation in order to provide a variety of services on the clients’ behalf.

The training and development team should be able to adapt to change and innovate, and to find ways to meet client demands for training and development to produce business results. In this book we will examine some of the strategies that can help you to plan the training and developmental processes that will guide your learning transfer, change management, training delivery and follow-up.

These strategies will help your organisation to plan and execute training and development in a way that works to best achieve business results, with the resources that have been allocated in your training and development budget.

Education Requirements

Planning for the provision of training in the call centre environment ultimately should be based on the desire to provide employees with the best training and educational services in a cost effective manner. This mandate should encompass all relevant company goals and objectives, with the overriding goal being to meet and exceed all client and organisational educational requirements. There should be a company wide commitment to empower employees, and set them up for success through training excellence.

The organisational training and development team should be accountable for linking training to business goals. So in essence the ultimate goal of the training and development management team has to be providing training that meets business expectations for results. Call centre training and development should not be seen as only an intellectual exercise, but instead it should be viewed as a supporting structure for business operations, that sets the organisations employees and the business up for success through effective training.

The return on investment in training and development needs to be justified in measurable business results. It is sometimes difficult to track the direct and indirect costs associated with training especially when associates have entered into production, since at that time, some of the costs will start to be shared with the operations cost centres.

Also the opportunity costs, for example of high attrition, as it relates to client operations are difficult at times to quantify. There is no doubt however, that these opportunity costs will be impacting on your business results. So at the end of the day, all measurable direct and indirect costs related to training should be correlated back to the organisational training team. Doing this, makes them accountable for meeting goals set for training initiatives, while at the same time effectively managing all of the related direct and indirect costs of training.

Costs are not the only factor, as customer and client satisfaction, should be factored in as well, to measure the level of success of your organisations training initiatives. For example, in today’s competitive market place where increasingly, customer service surveys are being used to measure consumer satisfaction, high levels of customer service as measured by those surveys have become of more importance to clients. It is a key metric that indicates whether the training being delivered to associates is paying dividends.

This does not mean that traditional quality considerations and the meeting of call centre metric expectations by associates, is not important. It just means that meeting and exceeding consumer expectations as judged by the consumer, has taken priority, due to high levels of complaints related to poor customer service in the call centre industry. The training and development team must take into consideration when planning training initiatives these shifting priorities so that they can develop training that meets the performance demands of today’s call centre business environment.

Global training and development planning and coordination efforts, requires that its leaders keep abreast with industry demands for excellent customer service, and high levels of quality and compliance from associates. Training management should decide on the best methodology that would be needed to deliver effective training that will meet these ever changing business demands.

That is one of the major challenges for the training and development team; the need for consistency, and excellent performance, in the delivery of training initiatives to the global training audience. This need means the avoidance of poor planning for training role outs, as well as poor training design and inadequate performance measurement for training initiatives.

The training team management should always stress accountability for attaining business results based on the training that is designed to provide support to operations. Accountability means that planning for training initiatives should take into consideration, the client or internal need for training. There should be a justifiable need for training, and the design of the training should be such that it can deliver the business results as identified by that need.

Many training initiatives fail due to the poor delivery of the training material and faulty implementation of training initiatives. This is especially true in the global setting and to ensure that this does not happen, the training process to be implemented globally, should be designed to accommodate for cultural, logistical and other relevant differences that will come into play, when rolling out training to a global audience.

This is why training and development planners should be willing to work with their counterparts in various foreign jurisdictions so that they can identify possible hindrances to the effective delivery of training and development initiatives, and work to eliminate the potential for those issues to occur. Training management should hold itself accountable for ensuring that this collaboration on training initiatives occurs.

Training that is designed for the global audience should be driven by the desire to meet business needs, related to the operating environment. This cannot be stressed enough. It cannot be that training material is just designed to meet the personal