In the early 2000s, my career was in call centers. After training for a work-from-home job for a company I wrote these tips.
So here are my top points for all trainers.
- Don’t waste my time. If you want to share stories of your life and such save it for breaks and before/after class. Do not take 20+ minutes of classroom training talking about your love of KISS and taking your toddler to her first concert.
- Don’t answer a question with: I said that earlier. If we’ve taken the time to ask, either repeat it OR better still, show us where to find the answer ourselves for reference when we are taking calls from actual customers.
- Keep control of the class. Don’t let technical issues of one or two people dictate how the class advances. Get them to the helpdesk, assist them separately and move on. The whole class should not suffer because someone can’t get their system to work right. We were hired with the understanding that we knew about basic computer maintanence and operation.
- Include sample calls and role plays throughout training. How on earth are we as new agents supposed to be confident in what we are supposed to without practice. Granted we need to learn a lot in a short period, but part of it should be practical application of the knowledge base and tools we use to assist our customers on calls.
- Do not contradict yourself. If you say one thing (ie: you can retake the test if you get 70+) do not then spend 1 hour discussing how many retook the test. Because, a) you said we could and b) if we didn’t do as well as you would have liked perhaps you should reconsider your methods, especially considering we all got the same or similar questions wrong.
and finally: - We are being trained as tier technical, why spend 2 days on sales if that is not the main focus of our job. Show us the basics/most popular sales we are going to do and move on. Because really our time is better spent on the main focus of what our calls are going to be about
Indomitable Bellatrix 