Quality & Training – Like a Hand in a Glove

Training is such an important component of preparing atHome™ agents to not only accept transactions, but to empower them to provide service excellence. Understanding the nuances of the product or service, getting the details down before actually interacting with a customer and preparing to perform with excellence are all goals of a good training program. Yet once the training is completed, ensuring that quality continues is paramount.

That is where quality assurance comes in – listening to calls, reviewing emails, guiding and coaching atHome agents to perform at optimum levels and providing consistent feedback so the agents can thrive. That feedback is so important. It uncovers trends, allows for improvements to handling transactions, gives clients the ability to make adjustments to better support customers, and yet…too often the QA departments keep this information to themselves.

The truth is that quality and training must work together. Once that initial training is complete, quality must support the training to ensure high levels of customer interaction. Creating open lines of communication between quality and training creates a more positive environment for the agents and ensures that the customer service levels are always at their highest.

When you have taken the time to hire the best people, you owe it to them and your customers to give them the highest opportunity for success. Creating a streamlined approach that encompasses training and quality is the foundation for that success.

These tips will help you align quality and training so that atHome agents and customers benefit:

1. Communicate the Foundation of All Training – training is developing curriculum to ensure agents are well versed on the product or service. Share the training with QA so that the parameters of the QA program will align with the training goals (rather than having a stock set of QA goals for every agent).
2. Open Lines of Communication – training and quality must communicate regularly in order to build stronger programs. Quality can provide training with important information to create on-going training programs, while training can provide quality with specifics to empower atHome agents to succeed.
3. Co-Develop Programs – not all ongoing training must be a formal affair. By having quality and training co-develop coaching programs, the agents will receive the best of both while having an opportunity to improve skills and enhance customer experiences.
4. Support Collaboration – build an environment where training and quality are encouraged to work together. It’s not a contest to see who can provide the most improvement. It’s a team effort that ensures agents are well prepared and customers have great service.
5. Move Beyond the Metrics – we all know that call centers are very metric driven. These metrics provide good information for training and quality to take action in a positive way. Seminars, coaching opportunities, and virtual training can all be used to support an agent’s growth. Utilizing metrics simply as a way of showing what is right or wrong will impede the ability for the team to experience growth, therefore limiting the team’s ability to provide positive customer interactions.

Training and Quality Assurance go together like a hand in a glove. By opening the lines of communication and having these two groups work in tandem, the agents have an opportunity to thrive! Happy agents mean happy customers!