I remember the tender years of learning to ride a bicycle.
My dad had a real straightforward method of teaching me how to put the pedal to the metal on my huffy. With no training wheels and only armed with my purple-flamed helmet, I learned to ride a bicycle simply from my dad pushing me down the hill in our backyard. Sure, there were many crashes, but eventually when I just kept going and going and didn’t fall or stop, I knew I had gained a skill that would stick with me for years to come.
As cliché as the whole “it’s like learning to ride a bike” metaphor can be, when it comes to training in your contact center, the best and most impactful training will come from experience and not what you can teach your reps in the classroom.
In a recent survey compiled by learning solutions provider Skillsoft and also polling firm Opinion Matters found that most CEOs in this day and age feel that training is not only important to maintain but necessary to invest in – even with the sluggish economy. With the advent of mobile communications, interactions, and transactions rising feverishly, training has never been so important to contact centers.
Let’s throw out a few points on how a contact center can maximize its training efforts. Many of these points are based upon how Incept embraces the practice of continuously training.
Getting the Most Out of Training
- Instill in your employees the notion that improvement never stops even after initial training does.
- Role-playing is an effective way to practice routine call circumstances with your trainees without putting them into the line of fire with a real customer.
- Foster your trainee’s strong traits while encouraging them to use those strengths to help other areas of their performance improve.
- Isolate your trainees from your regular representatives during at least the first week of taking on real calls.
- Have a trainer stand by and perform live monitoring sessions. The earlier you can coach on the right way to make a call, the faster that rep can incorporate proper call practices into their workflows.
Naturally, training continues to be an important practice in contact centers as traditional forms of communication keep changing. We have online chat services and live mobile chat services right along with your traditional telephone call. In the midst of it all, to survive, your company needs to exploit the experience gained by trainees early on in their lifespan to literally teach them ways to improve based upon real calls.
How does your company continuously improve through training?
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For those of you not familiar with Incept’s company structure, we manage our Conversational Marketing™ Experts (CMEs) in groups of teams across the contact center that are led by their respective Team Leads, followed by their Team Captain. The Team Captain acts as the stand-in Team Lead on days where the Team Lead is not there and also serves as a source of verbal and professional support directly in the contact center for that team. Think of the role of a Team Captain at Incept as a “future Team Lead in training”.



As I’ve been pushing my way through the ranks and have made it to the level of a Program Results Coach, I have begun to hone my technique when I deliver a coach to my Conversational Marketing™ Experts (CMEs) that make them respect me as a leader and coach, feel relaxed, and engage them to want to improve.




