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How To Align Contact Centre Training With QA Results

Any CRM system you care to name will organise your clients for you in a wide variety of ways – but it can’t think for you.

How to Align Contact Centre Training with QA Results

Delivering ongoing contact centre training on a fire-and-forget basis is no longer acceptable, not least because in business terms it’s very inefficient.

Why would you want to align your training with your Q. A. results?

Well, because otherwise all your training will be broad brush, delivering the same training to the same people on the same topics on. In some cases of course, this is exactly what’s required, for example induction training or initial tuition about a new product or service.

However, delivering ongoing contact centre training on a fire-and-forget basis, in the hope that at least some of it will stick is no longer acceptable, not least because in business terms it’s very inefficient.

We are all familiar with the training cycle, which is perceived in three, four, five or more steps, depending on who you’re talking to. All of them, however, start with same thing described variously as; investigate training needs / analysis / evaluation / identify needs, the list goes on.

So, what if we simply add another descriptor to that list? Let’s call it Quality Assurance.

Q. A. can be characterised as examining or testing performance and comparing that performance to an agreed standard. If you do that you are going to identify both individual areas of weakness and highlight trends across departments and if you have that information you are really well placed to design team and individual programmes that are precisely targeted to training needs.

This method means that your Q.A. programme will give you twice the bang for your buck. Not only are you measuring performance against, for instance the KPI’s that your client has defined and demanded but now it also sets up your training programme.

It is important to get the Q.A. set up right and make sure that you are testing on the areas that count, such as your customers key metrics.

You should involve trainers and indeed assessors at the set up stage. Trainers especially should be involved in calibration work. If they are training staff to consistently make good calls, they need to hear and agree what a good call sounds like and so they can highlight these key points in later training sessions.

Using the output

To make best use of the process as a whole trainers should work closely with assessors or analysts. They are the ones observing the performance and can point very quickly at areas of weakness that need more work or areas of clear improvement which is an opportunity for positive feedback. Collaboration is the key here and if these two roles work in tandem you are a long way down the track of delivering accurate and relevant training. They can also be teed up to listen out for a precise type of call which they can forward to the trainer to use in future workshops. In many organisations of course, the trainer is the assessor and the analyst who has an opportunity to make the process pretty seamless.

Analysts are also very good at providing useful insights and anecdotes that again, the trainer can blend into their classroom sessions. Here’s a thought, why not involve the analyst in relevant sections of the training?

When collaborating with the trainer, analysts too, need to bear in mind that, no matter how good the trainer, people will always misinterpret, ignore or simply forget parts of their training, it’s the nature of the beast.

Working together they can agree the areas that are working and those that aren’t; what could be changed about how a topic was covered in class that might make it more memorable?

All stakeholder should meet regularly to make sure there is an ongoing match-up between training delivery and Q.A. requirements. It’s also important to accept that training will not be the appropriate answer for every performance issue, but working together will generate training that means something and that goes to the original goals. We have all, unfortunately, sat through training that simply didn’t connect with the job in hand; in other words a complete waste of time. A rounded approach means that the team can work together, plan better training, make appropriate interventions and, critically, deliver on the metrics you set out in the first place. See how you can align your contact centre training and quality assurance with a free trial now!