Top 15 Best Practices for Call Center Agent Training

LimeCall Team

October 15, 2020
minutes to read

‘’86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.’’

Is your customer experience record matching the above expectation?

As a brand that is focusing on catering to the needs of prospects via the use of your agents, this entire process can’t just be satisfactory, it needs to be efficient and that same should be followed with each conversation.

Now all brands conduct training, but how efficient is your training process?

You cannot educate your prospects with the common lines that are reply quicker or answer all questions or don’t delay the conversations and the list can go on, your call center agent training process needs to be refined.

It is only when you refine your call center agent training process that you can see the better results expected from your customer satisfaction process. 

We know that there is a lot on the internet regarding this but its 2020 and old practices are replaced with the new ones that actually work hence you need a brand new version or rather a 2020 version of the top best practices for call center agent training.

We got you covered with this article:

Table of Content

1 . Make your agents feel good

2. Make your training more engaging

3. Conduct more call handling during training

4. Conduct monthly review calls conducted

5. Exhibit great customer support provided

6. Get the top management involved more often

7. Give clear feedback

8. Create a room for growth

9. Work on increasing agent energy

10. Use great agents to help the in progress agents

11. Provide incentives for goals achieved

12. Use analytics to enhance agent performance

13. Focus more on agent performance

14. Start setting up goals and KPIs

15. Conduct quality checks on detailed agent actions

Let’s get started.

Top 15 Best Practices for Call Center Agent Training you need in 2020

1. Make your agents feel good

If you have someone who makes you feel great about the job that you do, you will feel happy from within and you will continue to strive to work better to retain that position, this is exactly what your agents need to feel as well.

Make your agents feel that they matter, that what their opinion is matters too, when you do this they will be able to engage with clients better and that will help improve your brand communication related to better lead generation. 

2. Make your training more engaging

The whole agenda of agent training is to guide your agents in doing their job best which is communicating well with your prospects. Now you can’t have just normal training because at one point your agent is going to get bored. For instance, you cannot just feed your prospect with two-hour-long information and expect them to know what to do.

Interesting Read : Best 17 Ways On How To Prepare for a Demo Call That Wins

Instead make the training more engaging by having discussions, asking the agents what would they do for situations, their opinions, and more. The more engaging you make the training process the better your agents will be able to understand how a prospect needs to be communicated and dealt with. 

3. Conduct more call handling during training

Now the training purpose is to help the agents understand how they should cater to your prospects over a call. Hence it is important that you help them understand the process in such a manner. For instance, add in the call handling practice during their training, let them have a mock practice of what needs to be done, and how they can conduct the calls better.

This will give the agents the ability to learn more about their mistakes and perform better in such practice hence improving productivity better. 

4. Conduct monthly review calls conducted

Your agents will be dealing with calls now each day, to make them better each time it would be better if monthly review call meetings are conducted. In these meetings, a review of calls made can help the agent to understand better what went wrong in failed calls and how they can enhance their call actions better.

This will give them the opportunity to conduct better calls and that will improve the prospect engagement rates. 

5. Exhibit great customer support provided

When your agent is doing a great job, do you know what will make them continue in this same format? A good appreciation. When you appreciate your agents who do a good job, you motivate them better. 

Interesting Read : Inbound Sales Calls: Should Your Business Really Do It ?

For instance, when an agent has crossed their target and was able to serve their prospects better over call and you appreciate them whenever this happens, they will be motivated to work much harder because they are being recognized, that’s exactly what you need to do with your agents as well. 

6. Get the top management involved more often

Another way to improve the performance of call center agents is to get the top management involved. Get your sales manager or VP of sales to hear the calls, appreciate the agents, and help them improve better. This is impactful for your business because you can grow better, your agent’s performance will improve in a shorter time, and engagement with prospects will seem less like a task. 

7. Give clear feedback

When you feel that an agent can do better in their communication skills, proper feedback is what will help the agent to understand better what he or she can do better. If your feedback is,’’ your communications can be better’’, how can your agent improve?

Instead, you could show conversations and help the agent to understand what they could speak better and what they could do instead that can help them understand their flaws better and work on improving them. 

8. Create a room for growth

Have more discussions with your agents, let them interact more with their peers so that they can get a hold of the experience of calls and how to deal with prospects better. This can be a good growth process because your agents have proper clarity on their work from peers who are doing it before them. 

9. Work on increasing agent energy

Conducting calls on a daily basis is exhausting for your agents and with a mid-morning situation, their energy can fall low, you need to keep them pumped for the whole day. To do this, you can conduct actions that can help push this energy like a quick group discussion or a small break and more. 

10. Use great agents to help the in progress agents

Out of your agents, if there are a few that are working well with calls, it makes sense to let them help you, other in-progress agents, as well. This will help clarify doubts and errors and help them to get on with their work sooner. 

11. Provide incentives for goals achieved

When you see that an agent has done well in his or her calls, it’s always great to reward them with a good incentive because that is what will help them push their work to a better approach. 

Interesting Read : How A Callback Software Can Capture Your Prospects’ Interest In 5 Seconds?

12. Use analytics to enhance agent performance

You can always improve your agent performance, to do this conduct monthly or weekly analysis of how the calls are being conducted by them. By this, you will understand where the agent has fallen short off and immediately help them recover it. This action can make an improvement in your overall prospect rate. 

13. Focus more on agent performance

The calls will be conducted well when your agent manages or rather handles it well so the focus here needs to be how your agent can manage the calls, it could be their skills or the way they conduct the process, ensuring that maximum time is being given in improving your agent’s workflows. 

14. Start setting up goals and KPIs

Start setting up KPIs or goals for your agents to accomplish, with time keep increasing the goals so that they can continue to work better in the long run. This will help your agents to conduct a better call process and also simultaneously help your business to see the expected results. 

15. Conduct quality checks on detailed agent actions

The concept to train the agent here is to make them focus on quality calls rather than the quantity of the calls. You need to help them understand that quality of calls matters and how they can focus on that. The best way to do this is to write down a checklist to see if they match up with the pointers.

The Bottom Line…

You can always improve or rather enhance your brand’s communication with prospects better, in this case with the enhancement and progress work of your agents, your communication stands at a much better level.

All this information that you’ve just read needs to be consistent, the actions should be consistent because when you follow the tips above you’re doing your brand a favour to grow it in a better manner.

So tell us what did you think of this article? Was it helpful? Which trick are you planning to try first for your agents?

Share all your opinions by tweeting us

, October 15, 2020, LimeCall Team

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