Customers more savvy than agents? Get a grip on agent-skill training!

Customers are increasingly using different communication channels to contact organizations. Some of these customers are pretty savvy, knowing more than your employees or agents. Yet this doesn’t preclude them from demanding top service: on the contrary! Talk about being put on the spot and being on your toes.

For anyone working in customer servicing, it’s pretty much common knowledge today that success is driven by excellent customer experiences. So if this is the differentiator, the question is, how do you provide it? Well, the answer seems pretty obvious as well: through training. But let’s dig a bit deeper and see if you can answer the following/ questions:

• Are skills the new currency?
• Are you faced with the problem of your agents rushing customers in their attempt to maintain or reach AHT targets? This not only runs you the risk of customer defection and higher employee turnover (both very costly) but also lowered profitability.
• What exactly are the skills, knowledge and experiences (and the extent of these) that differentiate top performers from average performers?
• Can you replicate these to get the same high performance levels from others?
• Since standard, one-size-fits-all training has not proven to be cost-effective nor motivating for agents in general, how are you aligning the costs of providing personalized, relevant employee training with your organization’s business objectives?
• Since training carried out cannot be equated with acquired skills levels (i.e. the knowledge or skills that “stick” or are retained) how are you measuring the success or failure of training?

These are tough questions, to be sure and beg clear answers if you are to provide outstanding customer experiences consistently, retain and motivate your employees while turning a profit. Speaking of which, greater profitability has been proven to correlate with more engaged employees; basically, if you take care of them, they’ll give back in the form of better customer service and, in turn, increased profitability.

So, what’s the magic formula? Is there a solution that responds to both the relevant training needs of employees and the organization that’s reaching into its pockets to fork out the training money? This seems like a tall order, to say the least.

Look no further. The newly released white paper “Skills; the new currency?” will reveal all the answers and provide plenty of inspiration for managing your own challenges!