Tips for Creating Meaningful Curriculum and Delivering it Efficiently

Every contact center has a training process. Normally there is a process for new employees, otherwise known as onboarding, and also one for continuing education. Creating dynamic training curriculum to keep agents engaged and delivering it efficiently is difficult. But, the question you should ask yourself is how are the topics for the curriculum chosen, and how do I know I am successful? How does training interoperate within your business?

There are a number of great tools in the market today that can help you create curriculum and deliver it seamlessly. But, what happens if the topics are not driving the right behavior? Let’s talk through five best practices to create a training program that will drive positive improvement and growth in your contact center.

1. Make a plan for your eLearning efforts. Understanding the process flow from beginning to end is important to drive consistency. Outline how the education within your contact center flows from time of hire and throughout their tenure: how frequently are they refreshed with critical/ compliance information, how often do they need skills training, etc. Include information regarding owners as well.

2. Develop a training committee to help drive consistency in topics and success throughout the organization. Include all pieces of your organization: quality, workforce, recruiting, HR, etc. The training committee should discuss how to create better work models to improve trends and develop successful processes for agents.

3. Measure your success. Unless you track changes and improvements (or lack thereof) you will not know if your time and effort were worth the cost. Measure the effectiveness of your organizational changes. Are you bringing in stronger candidates now that you know what skills are needed to succeed? Is your attrition rate declining? Do agents have a strong sense of your commitment to their success? Are you correlating the success of your agents to the long-term business goals?

4. Find the right tools to make life a little bit easier. Tools can be expensive, but ultimately the ROI is well worth it. Not only can you reduce attrition, which impacts the costs behind recruiting, hiring, and frequent training, but you can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by better equipping your agents. The cloud makes eLearning tools affordable and agile to your needs. Tools that interoperate with other WFO components will drive more productivity within your organization.

5. Document your process. I cannot stress this enough. Once you have identified the process that works for your organization, document it, share it, and change it as needed. Most importantly, continue document it and maintain consistency across all teams and departments, as well as set expectations and hold teams accountable to impact change.

More Resources

• Webinar: The 4 Game Changers of Customer Service
  
• Whitepaper: Overcoming Productivity & Efficiency Challenges in the Multichannel Contact Center
  
• Research: The Multichannel Agent: A 2014 Contact Center Roadmap Research Report and Best Practices Guide
  
• Training: ICMI OnDemand All-Access Training Pass