Working on the phones is hard. Not only do our agents need to consistently provide excellent customer service, but they also need to stay on top of new technologies and the new processes that come with them. We want to introduce anything and everything new that will enable us to provide our clients with better contact centre services, but we don’t want to inundate our agents with heavy loads of training that keep them away from the front line.
That’s why we have decided to bring in a whole new approach to our learning strategy. Most of our agents are Millennials and Centennials and being one of them, I know exactly just how short our attention spans are – a casual print-out or Powerpoint slideshow was never going to be enough. We are a generation of videos and games, YouTube taught me how to fix my sketchy washing machine and playing Sea of Thieves on Xbox taught me an awful lot about how to crew a ship on the open seas, why shouldn’t the same medium teach agents how to use new tech systems?
We made the change, we decided to try it. Instead of flat reading material we now have comprehensive video tutorials, animated cartoons and interactive quiz activities. Not only did it bring us into the future and cut our training time in half, it got agents talking. The use of cartoon avatars based on real employees keeps things light and funny and creating tutorials about every little change means no one has to feel lost or be worried about asking questions. New changes and new things to learn can be funny, interesting, fast and best of all – new.
