15 best practices for contact center agent training programs

Importance of contact center training remotely

Contact centers are the principal means of interaction between businesses and customers. Agents work to facilitate these interactions through sales, consulting and problem-solving. When agents are more successful, the customers -- and the business -- benefit. But this success can't occur in a vacuum. Agents need comprehensive training in a range of areas, including the following:

• Using contact center software effectively.
• Following contact center and business policies.
• Adhering to the proper usage and protection of customer data.
• Understanding contact center limitations and escalation guidelines.

Contact center managers can attribute remote work issues like attrition, burnout and decreased employee engagement to the lack of training, professional development and coaching. Formal training -- from onboarding to new hire to professional development and career advancement -- is vital to successful agent performance and contact center success.

Managers shouldn't underestimate the importance and value of contact center agent training in remote work environments. Remote work imposes several accountability issues that can demand additional training to ensure remote agents do the following:

• Remain active throughout their shift and sustain their expected contact volume.
• Maintain an acceptable level of successful contact resolutions.
• Meet a required level of customer satisfaction, often through monitoring and customer feedback.

Benefits of contact center agent training

Proper contact center agent training reduces turnover, increases ROI, improves customer and employee experiences, and ensures regulatory compliance.

• Turnover reduction. Turnover in contact centers is a constant challenge for organizations. Training can reduce turnover rates. Training agents from the beginning of their employment reduces frustration, increases engagement, improves customer satisfaction and lowers costs. Contact centers spend large amounts of money on replacing employees, and those amounts significantly increase to replace management team members. Ultimately, effective training programs cost less than replacing agents due to turnover. Yet not all turnover is negative. Internal turnover is positive when staff members receive promotions or move to new roles within the center. Training and coaching can help staff members move into roles that require new skills.
• Increased ROI. If contact center managers focus on training and coaching, they can reduce turnover and add to bottom-line profits. Increasing first call/contact resolution (FCR) can immediately improve the bottom line by reducing escalations that can increase costs and decrease customer satisfaction.
• Improved customer and employee experiences. Employees want proper training, the tools to do their jobs, rewards for good work and understanding from managers when they make mistakes. By taking these actions, contact center management teams can satisfy their agents and help them better fulfill their roles. The result is improved overall CX, more loyal customers and a stronger business brand.
• Better business governance and regulatory compliance. The ways in which an agent interacts with customers reflects strongly on the business itself. Proper training helps ensure agent interactions with customers are always professional, fair and supportive. These expectations are a reasonable part of proper business governance. Further, adherence to data security, data usage and well-established business policies can ensure compliance with prevailing regulatory and other legislative obligations for the business.

Best practices for successful contact center agent training

Aligning training goals with business objectives, asynchronous training, performance analysis, agent feedback and AI integration are among the many contact center agent training best practices.

1. Develop goals and objectives

Organizations must ensure their contact center training goals and objectives align with business strategy. A company must develop and document its vision, mission, objectives, brand and culture goals at a strategic level to craft agent training content.

2. Develop KSAC profiles

Businesses should create role-based knowledge, skills, abilities and culture profiles to establish the KSAC requirements agents need for each role. A company can use this profile for recruitment and training program development. Following are the components of a KSAC profile and how they apply to contact center agents:

• Knowledge. Certain roles may require practical knowledge in a particular area. Examples include industry-specific knowledge, such as healthcare, retail and government. Agents can gain knowledge from experience, education and certifications.
• Skills. Agents can learn technical, social and CX proficiencies through training. Examples include customer service skills, technical skills and proficiency in specific software tools. Hiring teams can measure, observe and validate skills through tests and assessments.
• Abilities. Agents should demonstrate empathy and task switching capabilities.
• Culture. Agents should align with the company's culture, including its beliefs, values and behaviors.

When creating KSAC profiles, keep these questions in mind: What level of skill, certification, proficiency or knowledge must agents meet? Do agents need certifications or other documents to meet education requirements? How many years of experience does the company require? When businesses understand what each role requires for success at a KSAC level, they can hire, promote and train more effectively.

3. Analyze training needs

The company should analyze its training needs to match the desired outcome and assess its current state of contact center performance to determine where knowledge, skills and abilities are deficient. Performance gaps should be identified and resolved. It's also important to evaluate the performance of the underlying technologies, such as contact center software, to determine whether agents can use the available tools more effectively to achieve better customer outcomes.

4. Follow metrics and measurements

Businesses might struggle to develop an ROI model for training. The model requires a strategic approach to determine hard and soft costs. Before companies delve into ROI analysis, they should establish the following KPIs for their training programs:

• Agent performance measurements. Training directly correlates with the way agents perform. Companies should consistently review performance measures such as FCR, average handle time (AHT), quality, customer satisfaction and CX measurements, and professional development training scores.
• New hire agent time to proficiency. Contact center managers should measure how long a new agent takes to meet the center's minimum performance standards -- typically four to eight months, depending on the center's complexity. Also consider the quality and structure of the training programs based on onboarding and shadowing practices. If organizations don't formalize these phases, new hires might have chaotic experiences, take more time to reach proficiency or quit.

5. Use metrics that matter

Many different metrics can be used to manage and evaluate a contact center agent, but not all of them matter to the company. Avoid training goals, discussions or areas for improvement that rely on metrics beyond the company's interest. A company, for example, might be more interested in customer experience or satisfaction feedback than in AHT. Focus training on the most important metrics.

6. Determine training phases

Contact centers make a big mistake when they focus only on new hire training and the agent's first 30, 60 or 90 days. A successful training program requires phases with specific time frames as well as some stages that repeat throughout the agent's work lifecycle.

• Onboarding and new hire training. This phase is finite and typically administered at the corporate level. Agents are educated about the business, including its values, products, services, roadmaps and goals. This training includes paperwork and corporate HR policies. New hire training can last two to eight months, depending on the contact center and the agent's time to achieve proficiency. Managers can include various resources and training channels.
• Shadowing or nesting. Before they work on the floor, new agents can shadow one or many management team members. Not all businesses use shadowing, but shadowing can be helpful in complex or highly nuanced environments with strict agent standards. Nesting is a formal two- to four-week training process. New agents work in a practice environment with trainers, managers and other staff to help them learn while on the job.
• Refresher training. This phase focuses on retraining agents after management teams notice performance deficiencies. The goal is to retrain agents on skills previously learned and their performance requirements. Managers also should ensure agents understand any process changes the company might have implemented.

7. Support asynchronous training

Asynchronous training occurs in different places at different times with different people. It's an approach to continuous training that recognizes the company is always hiring and training new staff and it can be far faster, more flexible and cost-effective for agents to train at their own pace and within the time frame of their own hire date. One agent, for example, might onboard and train for two weeks before a second agent is hired and starts training. This approach is different than traditional synchronous training in which an entirely new class is started periodically, such as four times a year.

8. Align training, quality and coaching

Many contact centers can operate in silos so contact center managers should integrate training, quality and coaching as they consistently collaborate with each other through a feedback performance loop. Training programs must have specific criteria that managers can measure and review in a formal coaching process.

9. Set and enforce standards

Etiquette is often overlooked in agent training. Businesses are so focused on what agents must learn to interact with customers that contact center managers can overlook how the agent should behave during those customer interactions. Training sometimes involves a deliberate level of agent stress to reinforce behavioral standards that help them refrain from harsh, argumentative, insulting or disrespectful actions that can alienate the customer -- even when the information and resolution provided by the agent are completely accurate.

10. Deliver training in diverse ways

People learn and absorb information differently. Organizations should offer training programs in various styles and not always online. Management teams can assess how each agent learns best and tailor training to the agent's preferred style. How management teams conduct training might depend on the topic and requires an understanding of the learning goals and learners. Similarly, some training is best delivered in certain ways, such as in-person, instructor-led training to achieve certain goals, while other goals can be handled easily and inexpensively through online or self-study.

11. Embrace the role of AI

Artificial intelligence platforms are growing in scope and capability and increasingly prevalent in contact center technologies. One emerging role for AI is in quality control. An agent, for example, can use an AI assistant to aggregate and process available customer contact data, determine the type of customer request at hand, offer suggestions to the agent based on customer verbal queues and evaluate the agent's performance, providing real-time coaching.

12. Include agents in training

Organizations should ask for agent feedback throughout the training process. Agents can help create new processes, develop content for training models and provide input on knowledge, skills, abilities and training analysis. Successful training programs are built alongside agents, not in a vacuum and delivered to them. Agents should always be informed of metrics that pertain to them often through regular metrics dashboards or reporting. Performance outcomes should never come as a surprise to agents.

13. Foster agent collaboration

Contact centers agents can eventually become wellsprings of information. Savvy business leaders recognize ways to use this agent expertise through various forms of collaboration. More traditional collaboration allows agents to work together, asking each other questions, sharing new ideas such as creative solutions to new customer problems, and generally helping one another improve customer outcomes. A second form of collaboration is to establish a more unique internal knowledge base or help center that provides agent-only resources like FAQs or quick access to highly experienced staff to meet unexpected customer challenges.

14. Recognize and reward training success

Contact center managers can recognize and reward agents based on hours spent training, highest scores on quizzes, tests and certifications, professional development credits, quality and coaching levels achieved, projects completed, customer testimonials and internal group testimonials. Managers should be consistent each week and change the rewards and criteria to keep agents engaged.

15. Make it enjoyable and fun

Contact center managers can add elements of fun and enjoyment throughout the training process as part of the company's culture.

Continuous contact center agent training

Successful contact center agent training isn't a one-time activity at the beginning of an agent's career. Training is continuous throughout the employee lifecycle and includes many functional aspects such as quality monitoring, knowledge management, professional development and career pathing.

Contact center managers are vital to the training process and can help develop, administer and monitor training and provide real-time input through performance monitoring based on reporting and metrics. They're also key stakeholders in testing, developing and administering training across learning channels. If management teams focus on the key steps to implement and establish an agent training program, contact centers can increase corporate profits, reduce attrition and create a culture that retains high performance agents.

Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect the latest developments in contact center agent training and education.

Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 20 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.

Fancy Mills contributed to this article.