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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and I’m sure many of you are familiar with the term “10,000 hours to mastery”. This has since been proven to be taken out of context but he still references it as a guide to how long it takes for someone to master an innate skill. In Frans Johansson’s book, The Click Moment he explains that Deliberate Practice is a more likely predictor of success. Here are the core elements to Deliberate Practice
One of the core reasons our customers use our simulator is that it uses this deliberate practice approach. Many of our customers need to get contact center agents up to speed quickly. Traditionally they are putting them on the front lines before they have had time to really master interacting with customers. By using our simulator, they see how this gives agents realistic practice so they can reduce the time it takes to get to mastery. Like Johannson’s approach, our simulator is a predictor of agent performance — here’s how.
No need to use a crystal ball to try to determine who will be successful. Our ACES automates this process. The intelligence embedded into the system, allows the managers to know right where in the transaction the agent may have gotten off track.
Businesses don’t have the luxury of 10,000 hours of time to help employees get up to speed on their skills. So imagine if you had the ability to help your agents master many of your complex transactions in 5-10 hours vs. 5-10 weeks? You can view some examples on our video page.
In a recent conversation, I had with a client we discussed why they are using our simulator in their contact center. As a large BPO, their revenue is directly tied to documenting agents are following very detailed KPIs. They asked for me to provide a full list of how our simulator can impact each of these so I thought it would be helpful to share this list with others.
In number six, this was not an intended KPI but as a result of working with a very large technology company, they now use our simulator as a way to ensure outsourced agents are English Proficient. This came up when they enrolled agents at a call center in Vietnam. They were struggling to complete a simulation successfully. Our client thought that the simulator wasn’t working correctly. I assessed that their accents were too strong. The client was somewhat skeptical that this was the case so they placed them into production as voice agents. Shortly after they 
were in production, customers complained they were not able to understand them. They are now all chat agents. Moving forward all of their simulations now account for and measure their English proficiency with our simulator.
As we have proven many times, if you pro-actively use a tool like our simulator, you can address a lot of the “back office” metrics on the front end and improve the customer experience.
There is a lot of talk around replacing contact center agents with bots or some form of self-service options. But according to research conducted by NewVoiceMedia, 75% of customers still prefer a live agent (voice or chat) to help them solve their issues.
Successful companies know how to create a culture that allows agents to not only express empathy but express the Right level of empathy for the customer’s situation. Here is an example.
A customer who is calling to get roadside assistance because they have a flat tire.
Agent#1 “I apologize for your situation.”
Agent#2 “I’m sure that’s really frustrating for you.”
Agent #2 does a better job of expressing empathy that expresses what the customer must be feeling. They recognize what is going on in the customer’s world. This would be perceived as “more authentic” vs. canned and routine.
You can teach agents how to use the skill of active listening, here are 8 steps created by David Grosman that are right on target with how we teach this skill in our simulator
I’ve highlighted number 5 as this step is really critical step. It demonstrates to the customer that you truly understand their situation and can accurately paraphrase what is going on.
When the customer senses you are truly trying to get to the heart of their issue or how to help them out. This builds a level of trust. This connection is priceless and should not be taken lightly. When customers feel you are trustworthy they are more likely to continue doing business with you.
Do you know the difference between Omnichannel vs. multichannel? The latter refers to how customers complete a transaction. Omnichannel refers to providing customers with a variety of how they begin and end their customer journey.
Companies seem to be scrambling today to implement some form of omnichannel strategy but just how important is it to your business?
Based upon the Aberdeen Group, it’s very important to year over year growth.
But how is your company managing resources and your investment to support these channels? First understanding your target customers will drive which channels you support. If you sell a line of hearing aids, more than likely you’re not going to use a lot of Social Media to drive customer experience.
But what about brands who may have a prospect click on an image on Instagram, then connect via chat. The chat rep could then recommend a coupon or other products and increase their chances of closing a deal – in minutes vs. days.
In order to provide this level of experience the organization may need to completely restructure how it supports these operations. I’ve spoken to many consultants who help companies make these transitions and one of the biggest – as usual – is the change management process to make these modifications.
One fear they have is losing a customer because they don’t feel completely confident about their ability to manage these channels and risk losing a customer.
The majority of contact centers are starting with some form of self-service as their first point of contact. Even if these channels provide great customer experience, some people still need to reach a live person. When this happens, it’s usually not a basic interaction. This is why it’s so important that your channels have some path to carry interactions with a live person to reduce the need to “re-explain” the situation. No one likes to do this. You will need to enable these agents with skills to handle the more challenging situations vs. the basic interactions. This is one reason our simulator ACES™ is sparking interest. Companies need a scalable way to help teach more complex skills in a small window of time. Using simulation-based training is a great way to immerse employees into realistic training situations. 
So please don’t forget all of the legs of the stool when deploying your omnichannel strategy:
If you have spent any time in a contact center you’ve probably heard of the term “nesting”. It’s that phase for newly hired contact agents after they have had some initial classroom training but aren’t quite ready to go on their own.
On average, the ramp-up time for new agents is for two weeks. This doesn’t really give these agents enough time to digest all of the information they will need to be successful – at most, they will be able to greet the caller properly, and ask how they can help the customer.
To add to their pain, many companies are putting in place self-help tools for customers to use which means by the time they reach an agent, it’s a more challenging situation to handle.
Luckily there are some alternatives to this stage of onboarding. A term I heard recently was “phased nesting”. Meaning don’t force all agents hired at the same time to move through the onboarding process in lockstep. If you notice an agent is moving along faster than some of the others in the group – allow them to progress. This will maintain their engagement and self-confidence while the others moving slower are given more time to adapt to their new tasks.
One alternative we recommend is using our ACES™ simulator. ACES (accelerated engagement contact system) allows you to deploy realistic immersive simulations that use a phased-in approach to help agents get hands-on experience, with automated feedback from our built-in digital coach. This reduces the risk of taking a live call with an inexperienced agent and gives your managers the ability to see who is truly “floor ready” before placing them into the production environment.
To see ACES in action you can view some video samples by watching our Videos
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