In this video, I talk about why people can hop on a bike and ride it even without having ridden one in a while. The same principles apply to agents who learn how to manage customer interactions with simulations first
See part one of my Cognitive Load Series
This video clip is a snippet from a recent webinar we presented on how Cognitive Load Can Impact Agent Effectiveness. Cognitive Load is the amount of “working memory” people have at any given time to perform a task or learn a new task. Content from this webinar came from two primary resources The Extended Mind and Thinking Fast and Slow
On Sunday, December 8th, the show 60 Minutes featured a story about how AI was being used in the classroom to help teachers and students learn with the help of AI tutors (via Open AI). The AI is used with the curriculum to help students move through a series of question-and-answer interactions that help them use critical thinking to solve math and science problems. The system developed by Sal Khan, and Open AI, provides a dashboard for the teachers to use to follow the flow of conversations with the student and their AI tutor. The teacher can focus on students’ identified trouble areas vs. trying to spread their attention and feedback with less data to tailor their feedback for more immediate impact and retention. 
This parallels with Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s 2 Sigma theory on the best way to teach a student a new skill/knowledge and retain it longer.
Similar to the AI Tutor in the classroom, Benjamin Bloom analyzed teacher-to-many, peer-to-peer, and tutor-to-student methods of learning. The results of the tutor-to-student had the highest results. At the time his study was done, there was no scalable and cost-effective way to provide this in the classroom.
AI has allowed these tutors to be deployed across a large population base and respond at lightning speed.
Our ACES simulator does the same thing. We use AI to play the role of the built-in tutor or coach. Managers have access to very detailed analytics, just like the teachers have, to focus on the tasks an employee may be struggling with in the simulator as a roadmap to use as a way to provide the most relevant coaching and feedback. This allows the manager or trainer to be more Proactive than Reactive.
The report on 60 Minutes also addresses the risks or negatives of using generative AI in the classroom. As with a lot of these systems, there needs to be some form of guardrails in place.
For this reason, our ACES platform uses a combination of rules-based AI and NLP. When using our simulator in a call center, you want to design the simulations based on best practices for any given interaction in that call center. When using generative tools to help you “build” the learning activity, this runs the risk of not having consistent learning for each agent that challenges them to perform the proper tasks following your best practices. Call centers know what type of calls they have and the types of situations employees will be tasked with. Simply pulling examples from the hours of recorded calls can be used to create the scenarios that agents will need to learn how to respond to.
We all know these new generative tools are very attractive and can reduce our workloads tremendously. We still need to be mindful of when we use them and how. I believe we still have a ways to go before we can blindly deploy LLM (large language models) at scale but there is no doubt they are a technology disrupter.
Cows and Contact Centers
Check out some samples of our contact center simulationsProud 4-H Member
It’s a well-known fact that many call centers are challenged with getting agents up to speed as quickly as possible with a high degree of proficiency. The chart below shows the average time it takes for agents to become proficient. But we want to encourage you to start using simulations – like our ACES simulator
When we work with our customer’s call centers the #1 reason they use us is to get their agents up to speed faster.
Click here to see some examples
How companies can embrace the changes from COVID-19
It’s not about driving down costs — at all costs.
Procurement Cloud states that 47% of vendor relationships will hit a wall. Why is that?
There isn’t one single answer but many times it comes down to building win-win relationships vs. trying to drill down the price to shave percentage points off your supplier fees. Even in the middle of a Pandemic and economic downturn, there are ways to build strong relationships. Here are three top strategies:
- Good communication and setting ground rules
- Christa Heibel of CH Consulting Group, a well-known Contact Center Consulting firm, states in order to create a Win-Win relationship, begin with ensuring your contract flushes out all of the details of the relationship including how each party will contribute creatively. Listen to her Words of Wisdom an excerpt from our Contact Center Insights Podcast
2. Be transparent – I’m not saying give away trade secrets but the better the vendor understands how decisions are made, what other priorities are demanding resources the more valuable input they can provide. My first experience with this was 20 years ago when I worked for a company 
that had an onsite contract with Sears headquarters. At that time it was rare that a vendor would be invited to sit in on staff meetings and participate in the planning process but it gave us greater insight as to how we could provide our services in a more valuable way. We were able to become more pro-active in recommendations and felt truly part of the team.
3. Create channels of trust
When you’re making a buying decision, trust is a large part of the equation. Will the vendor deliver what they promised, will support be at the level you expected it to be. The same can be true for your role. Giving timely responses, clearly outline what your expectations are, and stick to them, not delaying payments or changing the terms of the deal allow the vendor to have faith in the relationship and align their resources accordingly.
For example, a BPO set terms with their client to abide by specific KPIs for managing a campaign. Mid-way through the campaign, the client’s business had a major re-organization and put pressure on the BPO to stick to the original terms and fees, even though their employees were putting in more time and effort to manage a new set of metrics and requirements. Even though the vendor may fear losing this client, in a solid win-win relationship, it would be fair to expect the vendor to ask for a revision of their contract.
Practice without a purpose is wasted time
Many organizations are great at taking a top performer and promote them into a manager’s role. But what they forget is that not all good frontline employees are good managers.
Recently I was working with a client who wanted to find a new way to teach her managers how to be good coaches.
Let’s first define the difference between “telling” vs. “coaching”. In an article written by Julia Milner & Trenton Milner, in the Harvard Business Review, it presents a great case study on how you can teach managers to be good coaches. Many of them start off with telling employees what to do — this is NOT coaching.
Coaching is a combination of skills that allow the employee to come to a solution of their own accountability vs. being told exactly what to do. I made a two-step recommendation to my client. As she was overseeing Quality Analysts for a global software company, I recommended she first take a look at a Coaching for Performance certification program from Benchmark Portal. They have many certification programs but this seemed to be a great way to give the foundational skills needed to understand coaching. 
Then I recommended that she use our simulator to build tailored coaching conversations her QA could use to practice various scenarios. As stated in the HBR article, you need to let coaches practice in a safe environment. This is exactly why companies use our simulator. It provides realistic experiences that can blend all of the skills needed such as:
- active listening
- questioning
- giving constructive feedback
- assisting with goal setting
- showing empathy
- letting the coachee arrive at their own solution
- recognizing and pointing out strengths
- providing structure
- encouraging a solution-focused approach
The embedded smart analytics reporting system will allow my client to access detailed metrics in real-time to see how well her QA’s are doing in the capstone activity of completing coaching simulations.
With many people still working remotely, it’s even more imperative that managers have the right skills to help their employees succeed.
If you’re curious to see how to use our simulator to build your own coaching simulations, please contact us.
