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5 Reasons To Invest In An Integrated Learning Management System (LMS)

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Contact centre eLearning: the way forward for your business?

Time is tight in a contact centre. It seems that there are not enough hours in the day, and you are juggling onboarding team members while chasing FCR, QA, and CSAT targets. Continuous development is vital for success but finding a way to offer effective, relevant training outside of instructor-led sessions is difficult.

Using an LMS to manage training across your Contact Centre will help ease the burden on a day-to-day basis and open up the possibility of eLearning. Contact centre eLearning doesn’t impact productivity as much, making it ideal for those quick top-ups, refresher courses and personalised training programmes that en-mass in-person training can’t cover. 

Hauling 30 agents off the phones to complete a session of in-person training has a significant effect on service levels. It’s also time-consuming and expensive to coordinate – especially if your contact centre has shifted to remote or hybrid working due to the pandemic. eLearning technology, on the other hand, minimises the impact on your service levels and customers.

Learning Management Software (LMS) also taps into more engaging, interactive forms of learning that are more effective at encouraging long-term retention than in-person presentations, where knowledge retention rates can be as little as 8%.

Here are five major use cases for eLearning in your contact centre.

1. Keeping product or service knowledge up-to-date

Especially for fast-paced industries such as SaaS, where new product features are launched almost daily, your agents need to frequently update their knowledge about your range of products and services. If they don’t, your CX will suffer, and your customers will start to churn.

E-learning allows your agents to fit mandatory product training around existing commitments. It also opens up learning methods that are difficult in a classroom, as well as allowing your agents to refer back to information whenever they need it.

2. Training in essential legal and compliance processes

Depending on your industry, there are some processes that your agents must follow in their interactions with customers. If they don’t, you could be liable to fines or other legal action.

To give a basic example, your agents may need to gain consent from customers before adding their data to a mailing list or passing it onto external partners under GDPR.

This knowledge shouldn’t fade over time. Quick, regular refresher training and pop quizzes are the most effective way to ensure your workforce are on top of their compliance requirements as well as providing you with evidence should your contact centre face an internal or external audit – using in-person training is cumbersome and disruptive.

3. Onboarding new employees

According to research by Glassdoor, organisations with a great onboarding experience improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.

Getting this right will reduce staff attrition, which is something contact centres have struggled with traditionally. It is reported that the annual rate of contact centre employee turnover is 26% – considerably more than the national average of 15%.

No one likes to complete onboarding journeys entirely virtually. To make an employee feel welcome, you will need to do some things in person – or at least over video chat, if you’re committing to working remotely long term.

That said, your team leaders have a lot on their plate. It’s pointless to add basic onboarding tasks like fire safety briefing or basic software tutorials to their list because there’s a fair chance they won’t get round to it – and all that contact time can make new hires feel overwhelmed too.

Ease the burden on both parties by identifying basic administrative processes that fall outside your team leaders’ core competencies. Run these as compulsory eLearning modules with a completion deadline to ensure your agents get access to the basic information they need to start strong.

Additionally, by having more insight into the performance of new agents as they progress through their initial onboarding, their strengths and weaknesses can be easily handed over to their new Team Leader.

For team leaders, this is amazing because they can better understand their new team members straight away and coach accordingly. This speeds up RAMP time and reduces the impact of new agents joining a team.

4. Developing agents’ soft skills

When people think of contact centre eLearning, they tend to think of those compulsory onboarding modules we mentioned, with a quick quiz at the end. Whilst this is a super useful way to deploy eLearning across your organisation, it doesn’t have to stop there.

The best eLearning content is personalised to agents’ unique needs. If a particular agent is strong in general listening skills but weak on turning prospects into paying customers, they should be able to access training on conversion tactics. A new team leader who converts but lacks leadership skills would benefit from training personalised to their area of need.

Your LMS should let you create a range of content types to build agents’ soft skills – think videos, articles, quizzes or even podcasts to cover a range of learning styles. Importantly, it should also let you assign these to agents based on skills gaps identified in one-to-ones or by QA evaluation data. EvaluAgent even allows you to automate this process by setting up LMS triggers, which auto-assign targeted training to agents based on where and how they fail QA evaluations.

If your agents can see a direct link between the training they are assigned and their professional development, they are much more likely to complete it. As your training completion rates increase, the level of service you provide your customers increases too.

In other words, personalising your training contributes to that standout CX that will win your organisation business and keep existing customers coming back for more.

5. Embedding key internal processes

Has your workplace ever tried to teach you how to complete a complex array of internal processes – such as reporting a complaint, checking stock or changing customer information – by sitting you down in a meeting room?

If so, you’ll know how difficult it is to retain that information from a single, non-interactive walkthrough. And, as contact centre agents deal with increasingly complex enquiries over more channels, your internal processes will need to expand to accommodate these. Your agents will need to learn and remember more internal processes than ever before, just to keep your contact centre running.

Interactive eLearning walkthroughs, potentially with voiceovers or pop-up tips, are a much more effective way for agents to learn and embed these processes than taught classroom sessions. Even better, your agents have them on hand 24-7 for reference when needed.

Take your contact centre eLearning to the next level

The use cases above are all major improvements on classroom-based learning – but to run a genuinely effective eLearning strategy, you need to target these use cases to where they are needed.

For example, if you connect Quality Assurance, Coaching and eLearning together, your performance management system could recommend courses based on their identified goals or improvement areas. Or, if an agent regularly fails their evaluations based on compliance, the system could enrol them on a compulsory refresher course to correct the situation.

This ensures that your agents get the benefit of eLearning but aren’t swamped with courses that aren’t relevant or won’t improve their performance in any way.

To do this, look for contact centre software like EvaluAgent, which provides an all-in-one platform for QA, performance management and eLearning.

Rather than siloing data across different departments, EvaluAgent combines QA data, customer feedback and contact centre eLearning into a single platform to offer real-time insights into how your agents could improve – and provides the tools to achieve those goals.

By Tom Palmer
Tom is EvaluAgent’s Head of Digital and takes the lead on developing and implementing our digital and content management strategies which results in creating a compelling, digital-first customer marketing experience.

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