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Today, many companies have started the practice of providing the option of working remotely to their employees. Due to the rising demand for working in remote environments, businesses are evaluating the best training models for their call center agents and equip them with the best tools and knowledge to ensure that the agents do not miss any important information.
Training remote agents can become challenging if not supported by the right training model and as much as it is important for agents to get training to be equipped with the right knowledge, it is also important to ensure that customers do not wait for long to get the right information from the customer service representatives. To ensure that the agents are well trained to resolve customer issues promptly, managers have to be prepared with various approaches to train the agents.

Training Call Center Agents Virtually

Today, many call centers are switching to cloud call center solutions in order to curtail their upfront expenses on capital investment. There are several other reasons why this can be a beneficial move for these call centers. While some include higher hidden costs, others include improvements in customer relationships and the managers’ ability in altering and monitoring call center operations as needed.
One of the major challenges for call centers for managing their remote agents is training them as that’s tedious to conduct online training over the phone, video, and web tools. This is where the selection of a good cloud call center software comes into the picture.

Creating a Knowledge Hub for Agents

Call center agents need instant information to resolve customer’s queries and equipping them with the right knowledge can be really helpful. With the help of a Knowledge Management System, a knowledge base can be created for agents to access whenever they are stuck with any customer service query.
This knowledge base contains FAQs, related product information, brochures, etc. to provide a handful of information to the agents while they are handling the call.

Creating High Trust Environment

Agents, while working remotely, will seek assistance from their managers while they are resolving customer issues. Manageress should be accessible to the agents via internal chat to ensure that agents do not feel bottlenecked with query resolution. Encouraging team collaboration and internal communication will help to create a healthy and conducive work environment.

Video Calls for Virtual Environment

Conducting video calls to establish fluid communication between team members is important. The managers and supervisors should be able to conduct interactive sessions with the agents and give them a platform to address their queries.
Peer learning is the best way to train call center agents. You can have an exemplary call that has performed well and set it as a benchmark for your agents to adhere to call quality standards.

Provide Timely Feedback

As much as training agents remotely could be tedious, so is call quality monitoring.
Managers should monitor the calls and score each call on the basis of call quality performance. This can be scored against certain business metrics like language proficiency, call handling time, query resolution, call wrap time, adherence to the script, customer satisfaction, etc. Agents will learn from the timely feedback provided by the managers and can ensure that they gather a positive outcome for their future performances.

Recognizing and Retaining Top Talent

Agents need constant motivation to perform well and learning should not be training should not be limited to improving remote agents’ productivity, it should also be recognized by the managers to boost agents’ confidence and encourage them to work more efficiently by incentivizing the best performance of the week or month.
Additionally, managers should be able to invest in the training module to equip them with the right knowledge that they will need for future performance.

Providing On-Call Assistance

Training the agents cannot be done overnight. It has to be a continuous process of coaching and providing assistance to the agents whenever they need it. Managers should provide on-call assistance to the agents when they start to deal with customer queries. In the initial training phase, managers should be present in disguise, monitoring the call in real-time, and provide whisper coaching to the agents on a live call to boost their confidence and help them resolve customer issues efficiently.

In a Nutshell

With the landscape of  cloud call center software changing rapidly, it’s imperative that businesses are shifting to remote work environments. Cloud based call center solutions do not only provide the flexibility to hire the best talent across geographies but also ensures that productivity increases exponentially while businesses save the money to be invested in the right technologies.
(Also Read: How To Choose The Right Cloud Contact Center For Your Business)