If you are a trainer, manager, or director at a contact center, then this article is probably for you. If you have one of those roles and you need to decrease training time, improve training results, and eliminate agent mistakes then this article is definitely for you. The videos in this article will introduce you to Zero Memorization Training and help you see exactly how you can apply it to your contact center. Video #1: What is Zero Memorization Training? The video below will give you a quick introduction to Zero Memorization Training and what results you can achieve (hint: decrease your "Time To Proficiency" for new agents by at least 50%).

If you've just recently heard about ScreenSteps, then you may not be familiar with how it can help your contact center. So, here's an introduction.

Right now, things are changing every day. Company policies, national policies, world-wide policies––everything is affecting how you do business and how your agents are supposed to handle calls. So, when policies and procedures are changing all the time, what's the best approach for communicating those changes to your call agents? It ain't Zoom, Slack, or email! In the video below, I show you how to use Interactive Conversation Flows to make sure changes to policies and procedures are applied to each and every phone call. The example is of a call agent scheduling a doctor's appointment.

Yesterday, call agents were supposed to say, "Unfortunately, we cannot give you a refund. We can only book you for the exact same time next year." But...pushback from customers made management rethink that policy. So today, your call agents are supposed to say, "While we cannot give you a refund, we can give you credit towards any service you'd like to purchase in the future." Here's the big question: How can you ensure that your agents share that updated information correctly (and consistently) the moment the new policy goes into effect?

With so many call centers switching to Work From Home setups, everyone's heads are spinning. Due to this new environment, you now face several challenges: Your processes and information are changing faster than ever. Your team is now spread out with no simple way to gather everyone together in the same room. Many of your agents are stressed about what is going on the world and fearful of what the economic impact will be on them and their families.

Last year, the ScreenSteps team did a customer story with Stephanie Beal, a manager at a contact center. She told us how she used ScreenSteps to decrease the time-to-proficiency for new agents by 75%. Before ScreenSteps, it took about 60 days to get new agents to a strong level of proficiency. With ScreenSteps, it took 15 days. I remember being on the call and asking her to clarify, not sure I fully understood. How could ScreenSteps do that? Stephanie then broke it down for me and explained how she formatted help articles as "call flows" that could walk support agents through any customer interaction. She continued to explain her main focus during new-hire training was to teach new agents how to use those call flows efficiently so that agents could help a customer on a call without having to memorize everything first.

In the training world, it’s easy to just do what everybody else does. But there are a number of misconceptions about training that you should be aware of.

The problem with documenting complex procedures and workflows Writing a simple "how-to" guide is easy. But, in reality, most businesses aren't dealing with "simple" procedures. Many procedures are complex, involving multiple steps, decisions that have to be made, sub-processes that need to be followed, and exceptions to the "normal" flow that need to be accounted for.

Call Center Managers often struggle with agent churn. Churn rates in the call center industry are extremely high, especially early on in the agent's time with the company. What many managers don't realize is that many of their agents "feel stupid". They are thrown into situations where they don't know the answers and are constantly having to either put the customer on hold while they talk to their co-worker, or pass the customer onto their manager.

THE biggest challenge that we see companies encounter is getting started creating content. We see two camps: The "Document Everything We Can Think of" crowd The "Create the Perfect Plan Before We Start" crowd They both run into trouble. The first group starts out really strong, but quickly gets burned out. The worst part is they spend a lot of time writing articles that no one ever uses.