Using E-learning In The Call Center

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Jun 2006 by Stoll, Melanie

Once a communications provider - wireline or wireless - wins a consumer, it must continuously deliver rich service experiences as a means to keeping that customer. The single most common point of contact is the call center. Ninety-two percent of customer transactions flow through the call center at a cost of $8 to $10 per call. Eighty-five percent of incremental revenues are initiated through customer calls.1 Studies have shown that a customer who has a rich experience while having an issue resolved remains more loyal than a customer who has had no service problems.2 Clearly, the call center, which is at the forefront of the provider-subscriber relationship, is critical to driving business objectives: customer retention and lifetime value. With millions of subscribers to serve and support, telecommunications companies must ensure that every contact center transaction is as efficient, productive and cost-effective as possible.

The most menacing problems in the call center are related to average call handling time (ACHT) and first-call resolution (FCR) rates - the former being too high, the latter being too low, and the result being poor customer satisfaction which, in turn, contributes to churn and increased costs per subscriber. Where efficient, productive, high-quality customer service creates satisfied loyal users who buy more; poor customer service creates a vicious cycle of frustration, costly transactions and, eventually, customer churn. According to a 2003 J.D. Power & Associates study, the percentage of wireless subscribers who said they were likely to switch nearly quadrupled among those subscribers who rated their carriers' customer care below average.3 In a separate study of approximately 20,000 complaints against U.S. carriers, top-cited criticisms included failure to rectify the problem, contradictory messages from the call center and rudeness.4

The primary culprits in the customer service crisis are overly complex and insufficient agent training. Agents must cope with a wide, ever-changing variety of technical products as well as incredibly complex systems that manage customer data. Nowadays, it takes longer to get things done, especially if agents have not received adequate training on navigation of the call center's systems. This repeatedly puts agents in high-pressure situations in which they ultimately fail to solve problems. It's no wonder that subscribers don't feel "loved," which explains high agent turnover rates in the first year. Consequently, critical customer transactions are left to a constantly changing workforce that collectively possesses very little product knowledge or call center expertise.

What can telecommunications operators do about this? Industry research has shown that telcos can greatly improve call center efficiency, employee success and esteem, and costs by implementing e-learning programs that allow call center agents to rapidly acquire the skills and information they need to operate complex systems, stay up-to-date with the technical products and services they support, and politely and consistently solve problems. By keeping call center agents in the loop, telcos can realize the improved customer loyalty and lifetime revenues they desperately need to survive in an increasingly competitive industry.

Employee training isn't a new concept. So why haven't we seen more success in the telecommunications industry? The answer is rapidity. Historically, training programs have lacked speed. Telcos cannot afford to wait. Technology and offerings change too fast and customer attention spans are too short. Traditional training solutions and learning management systems cannot keep up. Learning has to happen at the speed of business - responding to change quickly, effectively and comprehensively.

Enter e-learning. E-learning allows organizations to deliver faster, more contextual and cost-effective learning - whenever and wherever it is needed.5 Network delivery makes it easy to roll out updated knowledge and track which call center agents have or have not reviewed it. Centrally archived content can be updated immediately and made current for all users. Agents can use low call-volume times to participate in self-paced training at their workstations to stay abreast of new offerings and develop skills for career advancement.6 Newly learned skills can be put to practice immediately, which reinforces learning. And stakeholders can receive feedback on learner participation and knowledge retention.

So how do we successfully exploit these benefits? Following is a quick "hit list" for those organizations looking to cut to the chase with rapid e-learning for the call center.

Enable individual contributors at any skill level to develop content. Developing compelling content need not be complicated. To shorten the process of getting training information from the people who possess it to those who need it, contact centers must leverage familiar tools and paradigms. A 2003 study7 of e-learning professionals found that PowerPoint was the second most frequently used tool for creating e-learning content. Why? It's practically ubiquitous, familiar to nearly everyone, and quick and easy to use. Virtually anyone can get up-to-speed quickly. So, unless a contact center has on-demand access to instructional designers, Web developers and IT staff supporting a full-blown learning management system, companies should keep it simple by leveraging readily available skill sets and familiar tools to create content quickly.