7 Ways to Upskill Your Contact Center Team

Contact centers are changing rapidly, thanks to ongoing digitalization. The focus in chiefly on streamlining and automation, although other matters shouldn’t be disregarded either.

For one thing, the plight of the frontline workforce has affected contact centers, so the first step to consider would be to make their jobs more enjoyable. Much has been said about this, so we’ll only touch upon palpable tips.

We’ll hereby mention best practices as of 2023, including new technology, personnel, and operational guidelines.

Train Call Center Agents

Frontline employees, including call center agents, habitually receive less attention than their colleagues from other teams. Businesses need to adapt their strategy urgently to include development processes for frontline teams.

One good way to go about it is coaching agents in real time. The practice is certain to address all issues efficiently.

Customer service can be challenging at times since there’s no telling what kind of issue may occur and when. Nevertheless, call center agents need to be fully aware of what to do in the event that such a situation occurs. You might organize training sessions where customer service agents can act out various scenarios.

Last but not least, assign each new front-line worker a mentor. In this way, new hires will be aware of where to seek assistance in case of an emergency.

Automate Your Contact Center

Contact center automation can address multiple fields, including:

• Processes automation

• Empowering employee empowerment

• Customer connections

• Continual improvement

For best results, consider automated learning for contact centers. Pick automation software that offers unified RPA and conversational AI capabilities. The main advantage of this technology is that it will quickly assist you in streamlining and optimizing processes.

Personalize Interactions

Personalization shows customers they are valued as actual people; not just as a tool to generate revenue.

Therefore, make sure to provide soft skill training for your frontline staff.

Expecting your employees to be identical is unrealistic because personalities differ naturally. That’s why you should focus on the end result (personalization) and adapt strategies to fit employees’ personalities.

Establish a Record-Keeping System

Establish a solid record-keeping system and incorporate it into your processes. Your frontline teams should use the records for recurring situations, new procedures, and information reporting.

Keep note of every call so that repeat callers don’t need to repeat their explanation every time they call.

Call recordings have been set up for this specific reason after all. All call center agents should have access to the records so they can handle each situation quickly and effectively.

Recommended New Tech to Deploy

Automating repetitious manual tasks is an excellent idea. The strategy also does wonders for task filtering.

Here are some suggestions on which new tech to deploy:

VoIP protocols: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) delivers voice communication and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks (e.g., the Internet).

IVR systems: the Interactive voice response (IVR) technology allows humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via a keypad. The IVR technology allows customers to interact with the target host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue.  

ACD systems: An automated call distribution (ACD) system is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a group of pre-selected terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs often deploy a voice menu, which directs callers based on their selection.

Create a Knowledgebase

It often happens that new customers consult call centers to get answers to the most basic of questions. These calls are, as a rule, time-consuming (not to mention repetitive) because customers don’t know anything about the service.

To address this situation, it is recommended to draft FAQs that address frequent problems, which customers may solve on their own.

While this tip may sound excessive, such situations divert call center agents from other issues that can’t be solved by customers.

Establish Call Center Processes

It’s perfectly fine that not every customer service agent is familiar with the answers to every query; employees vary in their levels of competence. However, they must know whom to contact to solve the issue or who to divert the call to.

Basically, you need to establish processes to define all potential situations.

• Here are a few ideas:

• What should customer representatives say when they pick up the call?

• What should customer representatives do when they don’t know the answer to the question?

• How will customer representatives track the inquiries?

• What should customer representatives do when the call is over?

You can follow up with additional steps as you see fit, focusing on keeping track of inquiries. 

Key Takeaways

Everything considered, training, procedures, and new tech should be considered jointly. Record-keeping is also important, as is personalization.

To upskill your contact center team, you need to develop a complex strategy, which can be adjusted with ease to address new challenges. Assign mentors to new hires and create FAQs. The rest will fall into place over time.