Practical employee training is one of the more essential long-term investments you can make in your company. It is vital to your growth strategy and your company’s future success. That’s because training is how you help your employees reach their full potential, meet your goals, and provide customers with the experience they expect.
Unfortunately, many companies do not dedicate enough time or energy to training. They focus on one-time onboarding, and then, after that, they provide just six to 12 minutes of training every six months. This means that employees aren’t receiving the training they deserve or want—74% of employees feel that they are not achieving their full potential at work due to a lack of development opportunities.
The good news is that call center training software can help you overcome barriers to training and implement a training program that is easy to use and successful.
Call center QA software includes software tools and content that assist you with training your employees. Whether a complete learning management system (LMS) or a more simplified program, the tool should help you organize an online, in-person, or blended training program to manage, track, and achieve your learning goals.
There should be the ability to develop and manage courses, assign users, streamline attendance and delivery, and scale training to meet the organization's needs. When implemented effectively, call center training software should provide your company with the resources and insight needed to deliver training anywhere and at any time.
Home Grown Training Tools VS a Learning Management System (LMS)
The key to call center training software is choosing the right type of learning system for your needs.
Currently, many companies try to survive with homegrown spreadsheets. But while spreadsheets can help keep records of training, they are not scalable, offer no progress tracking, and require expensive and rigorous manual work. A spreadsheet provides no way to easily and quickly organize content, automate training activity, or review results. It is less of an all-in-one training solution and more of a manual record.
On the other hand, a learning management system (LMS) is an all-in-one training solution. It saves you time by automating much of the training process. You can quickly create and manage courses (using SCORM 1.2 and xAPI files), add LIVE courses, track attendance, assess knowledge (through exams), reward learners, and seamlessly integrate training into your other software systems with the click of a button.
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Training by Spreadsheet |
Learning Management System [LMS] |
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· Not scalable · No progress tracking · Poor organization ability · Expensive and rigorous manual work |
· Easily scalable · Automated course and user management · Blended learning options · Track, record, and analyze training progress · Integrates with other call center software |
The goal of call center training software (like an LMS) is to provide a centralized solution for managing, tracking, and achieving your learning goals. The program should partner with you to:
So what LMS features do you need to take your call center training program and customer experience to the next level? Here are a few:
Creating an effective call center training program can be a cumbersome task. However, it’s an essential one that can be made more accessible by using call center training software. With software, you can automate much of the training process, improving how you teach compliance, customer engagement, soft agent skills, and performance.
The software for your call center training program should be an all-in-one solution. The system's goal should be to automate the process of training and eliminate repetitive administrative tasks. It should help you quickly and easily assign learning to a large number of individuals at once to support productivity, retention, and growth.
The software solution should also go above-and-beyond traditional training to offer a more user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and guided training experience. And with all the features outlined above, it should help you save time, streamline, and manage all aspects of your training program without technical expertise.
Virtual training is essential whether you have a remote call center or your employees occasionally work outside the office remote call center, virtual training is necessary. You need a way to overcome disconnection, delayed communication, and a lack of resources to provide an exceptional learning experience.
The software can help you create an effective virtual classroom (on desktop, tablet, and mobile) to quickly and efficiently disseminate training. You can divide learners into groups or individuals and deliver cost-effective learning anywhere and at any time through videos, online tests, downloads, podcasts, games, and more.
Only 12% of employees feel that their organization does a great job onboarding. With call center training software, it’s easier than ever to create formal and informal employee onboarding. New hires will receive simplified training focused on the skills, knowledge, and resources needed to shine in their roles.
The software can automatically add and enroll the new hires into onboarding when they are entered into the CRM. From there, the new employee will be automatically assigned learning paths, courses, and milestones. You can even set notifications to remind new hires when it is time to learn.
The global workplace training industry is worth $370.3 billion. Unfortunately, much of that money is invested in ineffective learning, outdated materials, and non-specific learning goals. But with a call center training program, you can identify the critical needs of each employee and design courses that precisely meet those needs.
Within a call center LMS, each employee is set as a separate “user,” which means they can be assigned specific courses and training sessions designed for their development. And with the ability to track each employee’s progression via exams, surveys, and training histories, you can quickly and easily adjust learning to be more personalized and effective.
Call center training programs often throw everything at agents at once. This can leave agents feeling overwhelmed. The software helps you create a more well-rounded training program that is more directly related to your organization’s goals, resources, individual needs, and customer experience.
An LMS can help you identify gaps in agent knowledge through periodic performance reviews, exams, and assessments. You can even ask your employees to identify the knowledge gaps and skills they’d most like to learn through surveys. And from there, you can develop new and practical training that fills in those gaps with product and service knowledge, soft skills training, and more.
According to 68% of workers, training and development are essential to their success and happiness. They feel that learning gives them a competitive advantage and increases their productivity. It also helps them feel more engaged in their work, which means for 94% of employees, it helps them stay at a company longer.
Call center training software offers employees an easy-to-use platform for engaging in learning. It encourages them to spend their time training by creating learning paths that guide their experience engagingly. And the best systems offer both mandatory and self-directed learning so employees can take courses when they are most motivated to learn.
As for nurturing the desire to learn, one of the most effective call center LMS features is the ability to gamify learning. This offers learning and development teams the ability to set clear goals and milestones and recognize achievements, increasing overall employee engagement.
A customer service LMS allows you to add gaming mechanics to the learning process. Along each step in the training program, you can reward learners with badges and points and even highlight top performers and award prizes on a call center dashboard. In this way, you continuously promote agent improvements by making learning fun, engaging, and agent-focused.
If you want happy customers, you need well-trained employees. Call center staff trained using an LMS are more likely to develop and perfect their customer service skills. They’ll be trained above-and-beyond onboarding to continually develop experience assisting customers, demonstrating empathy, and handling customer complaints.
Call center training software allows agents to practice interactions and gain immediate feedback on their performance. This helps them make progress regarding technical skills and soft skills, processes, products, services, and compliance. And since they can learn at their speed, they can learn not just to meet but exceed customer expectations.
Without an LMS, it isn’t easy to track the effectiveness of your call center training program. But with software, you can gain valuable insights and actionable reports about how you’re meeting your learning goals. In fact, you can track, score, analyze, and improve upon all QA metrics, which is critical to exceptional call quality.
Through automated daily, weekly, and monthly reports, learner surveys, and performance dashboards, you can track training progress. In this way, you can directly measure the impact your training has on your ROI. Then, from there, you can organize further training to improve performance.
Delivering and managing call center agent training takes time and energy. However, call center training software eliminates many of the everyday administrative tasks. As an all-in-one solution, your call center LMS can help you create consistent and simplified training that is mainly automated and designed to train and engage many employees at once.
And because the software makes your call center training program entirely online, it’s effortless to create new material. This means you can spend less money on trainers and materials that lose money over time. And since you can update the learning process at a moment’s notice, you can make your training more cost-effective and fluid.
Now that you know why implementing call center training software is essential, how do you get started? There are six steps.
First and foremost, you need a game plan to create your call center training program. This means you need to outline all of the training that needs to occur from the ground up. And be as specific as possible about what needs to be covered and how often that training needs to happen.
There are three questions you need to answer to get started.
Next, you want to choose the suitable LMS to help you efficiently deliver, effectively manage, and accurately measure your call center training program. By implementing an easy-to-use learning management system, you create a single, comprehensive learning platform for your training needs.
Look for an LMS with all the outlined features and a vast online environment for on-demand and instructor-led training. The system should streamline content creation, attendance, and classroom delivery. It should also have the ability to offer different course types and styles to best suit the individual learner (document, presentation, video, audio, webinar, live training, etc.).
The LMS should also be highly flexible, allowing you to train based on your agents’ schedules and needs. If it is not a user-friendly and comprehensive learning and development solution, such as Scorebuddy’s LMS, it is not the best system for your needs.
Once you’ve chosen your call center LMS, you need to set it up correctly for efficient and effective call center training. With Scorebuddy’s LMS, this is a simple six-step process.
If this is your first time building a call center training program and implementing software, start with what you know: your onboarding program. Instead of trying to jump to delivering ongoing and continuous training immediately, focus on implementing software for your onboarding process.
Onboarding is essential for job retention and job efficiency, so using software to automate onboarding in your call center to ramp up agents effectively uses your time. It allows you to manage training procedures, look past software functionality, and ask, “does this help solve my problem?” It also helps you add structure and measure return on investment.
Employee onboarding is only part of the process in an overall training program. It’s the first step, but you have to create long-term employee education goals. This means you need a way to make interpersonal development a regular part of your agents’ work life. They should have access to an extensive catalog of courses that they can pick and choose from for self-directed learning and instructor-led learning.
One way to ramp up training is to break down your education goals into steps with timelines. You can create learning paths that employees can enroll in with grouped courses on a specific topic. For example, you can create a sales learning path with three methods:
Then, once a user has completed one course or a specific timeframe has passed, they are auto-enrolled in the next course for continual progress.
You’ll only know if your call center training software is successful if you report, monitor, and improve upon it. Use your software to view reports on how healthy onboarding and ongoing training perform. You’ll want to access details on employee performance to ensure they’re staying up to speed and gaining new knowledge.
Identify training gaps, confusing and inefficient processes, and employee frustrations. The goal of the software should be to create a frustration-free and user-friendly training environment, so be prepared to make changes as needed.
And don’t be afraid of asking for employee feedback. It makes your employees feel more valued, but it will help you improve your training processes.
Scorebuddy LMS™ is a single platform solution that offers contact centers the ability to perform QA alongside a fully featured LMS and a rich library of curated content inside the Scorebuddy Academy™.
Our call center training software is easy-to-use and helps contact center managers and quality assurance managers deliver practical and accurate call center training. Users have easy access to training content and curated expert courses to educate and certify their teams.
Features include:
It’s learning as it should be—in an all-in-one, robust solution. For more information on Scorebuddy LMS™ and Scorebuddy Academy™, visithttps://www.scorebuddyqa.com/learning-and-development
