Training is defined as the systematic development of knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are needed by individuals to perform adequately their jobs (Briljent, 2014). Some can also define it as a process that is geared towards modifying attitudes, knowledge, skill and behavior through learning experience to achieve better performances in a range of activities. This paper is going to provide an evaluation that compares the effectiveness of providing customer service training through e-learning or face-to-face in the classroom. Recently, Call center staff in our organization were randomly picked and assigned to each of these training programs (Briljent, 2014). After the training, some observations were made with regards to their phone skills and dealing with difficult people after 1 month. The findings of these observations were then presented to the vice president with recommendations concerning future training.
For an improvement in performance to be achieved, any training must result in an enhancement of the skills and professional knowledge for both individual employees of the organization and the entire organization as a whole. Training should additionally equip personnel with an appropriate response to challenging situations that may emerge (Giere, 2000). There should be changes in people’s attitudes and a distinctive synthesis between the promotion of organizational goals and enhancement of individual competencies after training.
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There are different methods of training employees, and these are on-the-job training, job rotation and job mentoring. On the job training gives employees an opportunity to learn by performing a job or task. Job rotation involves teaching current employees how to perform other tasks over time. The idea is for an employee to rotate around different jobs in the organization and perform various tasks that are different form his or her job (Giere, 2000). Job mentoring allocates employees to experienced coaches to oversee their activities and learn from their experiences. The job of the mentor is to give advice and instructions as opposed to performing the job as on-the-job training does.
First is a brief background of the organization and its customer service department. MoneyMint Bank serves many American households with a wide range of financial services that include personal banking, credit cards, auto financing, mortgages, investment advice, small business loans and payment processing. MoneyMint has a customer service department which has customer service representatives who interact with its customers to give the information that addresses their inquiries about the bank’s products and services. The also handle and help with resolving any complains that the customers might have. For example, the may assist a client with opening an account or even assist them if they are having a problem with accessing their account or if an order that they made never arrived. In many cases, customer service representatives get information via phone calls. The main obligations of a customer service representative it to analyze the needs or demands of a customer and try to resolve them, deliver quality services to customers, do promotions of the products and service of the bank, built good customer relationships, create new accounts, maintain and manage existing accounts, respond to customer queries ensure best practice regarding customer service.
MoneyMint’s Customer service department has a Call Center sub-division. So the call center generally handles help desk services, customer support, lead generation, telephone answering services, outbound calls and inbound calls. It handles a huge volume of telephone calls at the same time; it screens calls and forwards them to the relevant people who have the qualifications to handle them. The call center agent s are required to have the following skills: Learning Skills, Communication Skills, Customer Handling Skills, Team work and Individual capabilities, Telephone Etiquettes and the ability to respond professionally to clients on the telephone , ability to use proper grammar Vocabulary skills relevant to a call center position, Attention to detail and ability to follow specific instructions Basic math, logic, analytical and telephone problem solving skills, Ability to follow specific instructions and telephone problem solving skills. The Call center agents work on very strict schedules to give customer service 24 hours 7 days a week. The bank needs to make an optimization of call centers in order to match the volume of incoming calls; they should have enough agents to handle call volumes during peak hours at the same time the bank does not want to have agents sitting and idling around when call volumes go down.
So for this reason, recently the bank organized two sets of training for the Call Center Agents. One was through e-learning, and the other was face to face in a classroom set. Agents were selected randomly to participate in either of these training and then they were evaluated to assess which training method was more effective. This paper will critically evaluate both these training methods.
Training agents give a number of benefits to the contact center; however, its main objective is to improve the performance of agents and thereby increasing customer satisfaction. Training is geared towards assisting agents to develop customer service skills and provide relevant and up to data information regarding the bank's products and services. By giving educational content that is personalized, the call center can target skills gaps for individual agents. E-learning training techniques help in delivering personalized training at the agent’s desktop. Agents can have a dashboard through which they can monitor their performance in tests and their overall training progress and get a better sense of how they are doing. This improved visibility and responsibility increase the agent’s job satisfaction. Moreover, e-learning training reduces some pressure on supervisors because the results from online training courses are directly input into the systems, and the training can be automatically scheduled to fit the work load that the agent has.
When agents have more access and visibility to their training progress and the skills that they can use to carry out their job effectively, the bank can increase job satisfaction and reduce the number of irate customers (MITRANESCU, 2016). Also if agents have to correct knowledge and skills, they are well equipped too answer to customer inquiries and in turn increase customer experience. This kind of improvement can have so many effects that anyone can imagine as it improves customer service experience and increases customer loyalty.
Now the bank has about 100 agents, and it faced a challenge of putting together call data and order data and was unable to share this information in real time or even provide intervention when agents needed some assistance. During major holidays like Christmas, Easter holidays, Thanksgiving holidays, Valentine’s day week, Mother’s day weeks the bank tends to get much more calls than usual days. And therefore it has to hire quickly and train new agents to meet this demand while at the sometime making arrangements for ongoing training for the agents that currently exist (CMP, 2006).
The bank, therefore, used a combination of WOT’s from VPI, that also included performance tracking and reporting and e –learning and coaching. This solution allowed it to give customizable dashboards at the agent’s computers enabling the agents to keep track of their training progress. The VPI e –learning report cade was used by the bank to track the training progress for every agent that attended this training (VPI, 2010). The VPI technology enabled the bank to create a set of rules to trigger that training for the agents once they were selected randomly. The coaching tool was used by managers to embed quizzes and surveys into the content of training. This gave them real time feedback once the training courses were completed and gave them time to evaluate the performance of the agents. The then had the chance to respond faster to issues of when agents where not meeting their targets.
So what are some of the observations made from agents that when through the e-learning training process? One was improved work utilization. The each agent is now able to handle up to five more transactions per day. Two was an increase in conversation and upsell; agents equipped with more knowledge provide customers with relevant information and improved customer experience (Giere, 2000). Three was the savings made on the cost of paper and printing. Using e- learning training managers just send whatever information they have directly to the computer of the agents, this includes tests to make sure that the information is read and understood correctly. The results or also sent back to the mangers online immediately and therefore less paper work is needed. Four is the simplified training management. The combination of e-learning and reporting provides an easy way of measuring the effects of training and makes a comparison of the test results to performance matrices like the average call handle time or the average hold time. Thus managers can identify the deviation between top performers and poor performers. And five was the increase in agent responsibility. The agents were able to manage and monitor their own training and where appropriate schedule their own training and also have access to their progress reports (VPI, 2010). This increased competition on a peer to peer level and relives the managers of the pressure to keep monitoring their agents.
The other set of agents were subjected to a face to face training. It is said that the most prevalent form of training for call center agents is through the use of classroom training together with role plays. Role playing has a theoretical based on modeling behavior through observation, practice, and feedback. It is a training technique that is widely accepted for improving the performance of new agents (Briljent, 2014). The main disadvantage of role playing is that it is not customized or individualized, it is also not scalable easily, and it is more likely to give variation in the quality of training that is received. The experience of the instructor, and his proficiency as well as situational characteristics like the moods of the instructor, the setting of the classroom and trainee dynamics can affect the quality of role play training.
In either of the training, the following best practices should be followed. First, the agents should feel empowered and should be provided with the necessary tools to help them make great decisions on behalf of the bank. Agents who are highly trained and have the power to make decisions not only make sure that customers are highly satisfied but also increase the probability of single call resolution. Secondly, the training should be engaging and varied. Make sure that you shy away from monotonous training because if the agents are not engaged, then the training has no benefits. Thirdly, there call handling during induction training should be done alongside role plays. Those who are performing the training should endure that they have training equipment that work and that are available in real time. Fourthly, carry out frequent meetings with the representatives of the department so as to review calls. Fifthly, be sure to make recognition when there is great customer support from the agent. Sixth, Invite the upper management to listen to agents as they make calls and offer them praise whenever necessary. Give feedback that is clear and actionable as this is really important for the agents to understand what you are trying to communicate (Giere, 2000). Seventh, make opportunities so the agents can discuss quality with their agents. Call Center interactions should not entirely be based on the manager to agent conversations. Ninth, the bank can start over lunchtime learning sessions where agents can decide to deliver a session on a topic of their choice. Tenth, new agents, can be buddied up with older agents in order to improve their performance. When they build relationships early with top performers, new agents are more likely to copy what the top performers do. Eleventh is to provide incentive offers to teams that perform well, for instance, giving out tokens for prize draws. Twelfth is to use speech analytics in order to pick out training opportunities for agents. The ability to analyze high numbers of interactions between agents and customers can help identify issues or trends across the agent population thus making the opportunity to coach staff by using specific examples.
My recommendation, in this case, is to create a balance of online and face to face training. Online courses have questionnaires for assessment and face to face training which is carried out in groups or one on one session. These types are training are useful but are used differently. The e-learning training technique give the bank more flexibility in scheduling training as the agents do not have to leave their work stations, and the different courses can be put in place around the times of peaks calls. It gives small pieces of information to the agents in regards to their training which they can complete on their own (Giere, 2000). At the same time, there are some sorts of training that are best carried out in a classroom setting of on a face to face basis. These types of training need to be thoroughly planned, locations for training need to be booked in time and requires a group of agents to attend the training at the same time. There for this kind of training is necessary to relay information that is complex. Because most of the time agents work alone, classroom training will help the agents to interact more and learn from each other. Therefore the bank should create a suitable balance of e-learning and face to face training in order for it to get the most suitable result. In doing this, they should consider many factors like the kind of information that is being shared, the schedules of the agents, the availability of resources and how urgent the training is (VPI, 2010). The bank needs to encourage agents to collaborate and learn more from their own mistakes, be it in a classroom setup or by providing forums in which the agents share tips with each other. This is a peer to peer training is best of providing the agents with empowerment and giving them more responsibility and also improve their satisfaction and chum rates.
The bank should also put into consideration the total amount of automaton that should be incorporated in the training of the agents. There should be a balance between the automated selection and the dissemination of the training courses with ad-hoc assignments by the managers; this should be based on performance scores (VPI, 2010). The managers may decide that they need more control over the training process and decisions to make sure that training is done at the correct time, and the right agent undergoes the training more so those issues that are complex. Also, e-learning training related to different types of performance can be initiated by low scores thus reliving managers some headache and give agents more flexibility to complete training when their schedule allows.
References
Briljent. (2014). Training . Retrieved from http://www.briljent.com/practice-areas/training
CMP. (2006). Agent Training and Performance Development. Retrieved from http://www.icmi.com/files/library/si00016.pdf
Giere, N. M. (Ed.). (2000). Call Center Training . New York: American Society for Training and Development.
20 best-practices for call center agent training . Retrieved from https://blog.aircall.io/20-best-practices-for-call-center-agent-training/Development.
VPI. (2010). Five Secrets to Contact Center E-learning and Coaching Success . Retrieved from http://www.vpi-corp.com/Resources/Whitepapers/5_Secrets_to_E-learning_and_Coaching_Success_by_Ovum_and_VPI.pdf
