2020 gave us all a crash course in virtual learning. One day we were all able to carry out our trusty training programs in a classroom and the next day — boom — all training had to be conducted online.

It’s that time of year again for your call center. You know it well. It’s the time when the number of incoming calls increases by 4X — it’s your busy season. You know the feelings surrounding your busiest season: supervisors are overworked from being pulled in a thousand directions, experienced agents are overwhelmed from covering complex calls, and new hires/seasonal workers are nervous (sometimes even making themselves physically ill from fear of answering calls).

There’s something you should know — your call center agents don’t want to read technical call center guides. I know. It hurts. Technical guides take a lot of time to create and they have a ton of detail. But they’re no fun to read. Unfortunately, the reality is that relying on technical guides is unavoidable in many situations.

Have you noticed that your virtual trainings haven't gone quite as well as your classroom trainings did? Reps quit out of the blue after the first week. No one's interacting (except for that ONE who always chimes in before anybody else can contribute). And when reps get on the call with an actual caller, they're either getting physically ill or going completely blank — like they haven't just spent 6 weeks in training?

Call centers deal with a lot of change! Especially in the year 2020. Everyone has had to think about redundancy, business continuity plans, staffing, work from home, and a whole host of other issues.

Don't worry. Wishing that your reps and co-workers would look at your written procedures and guides (and stop bothering you with questions) doesn't make you a bad person. There's only so much time in the day! But wishing won't get you anywhere. So let's look at why your employees and agents aren't using your resources.

Tell me if this sounds familiar... You were hired/promoted to be a call center supervisor or manager and handed a bunch of spreadsheets or PDFs with your protocols and procedures on them. You didn't create them, but you're now responsible for keeping them up to date. Or maybe you're in this boat... You were hired/promoted to be a call center supervisor or manager and had NOTHING to work with. Nobody had documented anything before you got there. So you opened up Visio, Word, or Excel and started documenting processes and procedures hoping that you could use them to train your reps.

There are a lot of metrics to track at a call center. Luckily, there are a few metrics that stand out when it comes to providing excellent customer service. Two of the call center metrics that are almost always at or near the top of the list as "most important" are Quality Assurance (QA) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores. But, how can you improve QA scores? And how can you improve CSAT? As the Director of Transformational Services at ScreenSteps — knowledge base software that supports call centers — I've worked with many call centers to create procedural guides and call flows that call center agents can use on calls. These job aids help improve agent performance, and, consequently, QA and CSAT scores. Watch the 3.5-minute video below to learn more about how procedural guides can help improve agent performance in your call center. Plus, I explain more about QA and CSAT scores.

We all have to deal with change — especially if you work in a call center! Change can cause chaos, which is often manifested through longer training times, decreased QA scores, increased hold time, etc. But it is possible to build a training program that is resilient to change. In this recorded web training, we explain how you can create a training program that can handle changes in people (new hires), processes, or location (WFH or on site). Watch the 30-minute video below to learn how, or jump to the section you need with the Table of Contents. Table of Contents: 0:50 – What do your customers want? 1:42 – How can you give customers what they want when you are going through change? 4:54 – Keys to building a resilient plan 5:18 – How do you systematize a call? 6:10 – Zero Memorization 🔎 Related: Save time training with Zero Memorization 9:34 – Step 1: Identify and systematize your calls (with an example) 17:22 – Step 2: Turn those systems into searchable call flows (with an example) 23:03 – Step 3: Train agents to use the call flows 25:22 – Step 4: Iterate, improve, and adapt 29:34 – Build a resilient call center with ScreenSteps