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State of Workplace Training in Contact Centers

By Laura Martin, Vice President Marketing, Axonify, Inc.

While it may seem like an obvious choice for management—provide the right training for your employees so they will do the right things to drive company success— this isn’t the case for most organizations.

For the second year in a row, Ipsos, a global market research firm, conducted an online survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adult employees across a variety of industries. The result? One third of all employees surveyed receive no formal job training and 38% of contact center employees receiving only classroom training.

Despite the recent advances and innovations in the training industry (not to mention the scientific research proving that long, traditional classroom-style training is ineffective), the state of workplace training has not changed much over the past few years.

To be frank, it is alarming to see how many companies are failing to implement new approaches to learning as a part of their overall culture—especially when 57% of employees recognize the value of formal workplace training and 88% of contact center employees feel it positively impacts their job engagement. When frontline employees and agents aren’t provided the right training they need to effectively perform their jobs, they become disengaged. Unsurprisingly, performance, productivity, and customer satisfaction can suffer as a result.

For training to be effective, it needs to be fun, easy, and fit naturally into employees’ daily workflow. It must also be delivered in focused bites and map to how the brain works to ensure that employees remember the information they learn. The Ipsos research supports this, with more than two-thirds (73%) of contact centre employees stating the importance of short training sessions and 86% wanting regular, frequent training so they won’t forget.

How to improve your contact center training

One of the best places to start is with the frontline employee.

Some questions you may need to ask include:   

• How do your employees feel about training?
• What sort of things are important to them?
• What could leadership do to increase their engagement and make the learning experience more impactful?

Fortunately, Ipsos has done the heavy lifting for you. Their study reveals the importance of effective corporate training and how, when employees are engaged in training, it can drive real business results.

The training frontline employees want 

The results are clear: workplace engagement has increased in importance to employees in all industries—including contact centers. Not only have specific training elements related to engagement increased in importance year over year, they have also become more important to employees. In other words, employees want to be engaged in training that reflects their needs. But what are those needs?

As the chart above illustrates, contact center employees placed the highest emphasis on being paid to complete training. They also want training that is easy to understand, can be done when it’s convenient to them, makes knowledge available in the moment of need, and can be applied on the job.

In today’s work environment, it’s absolutely critical for an organization to enable agents to develop the unique skills and knowledge each one needs to excel at their particular job. The reality is that the majority of companies are falling short of delivering the training that accomplished this. That’s because one-size-fits-all programs just can’t meet these varied requirements.

In order to be effective, learning must continuously build and reinforce the right knowledge for each employee based on what they know (and don’t know) to develop the right behaviors. When learning is done this way, it drives measurable business results that positively impact the bottom line.

If you want to empower employees to contribute to the overall success of your organization, I encourage you to think about what you’re doing to deliver the type of training agents want—and need.

To download the full report, visit https://axonify.com/u/ipsos-contact-center-eitk/