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What is the difference between foundational and actionable knowledge? And do you separate these two when creating a training plan?

It’s challenging to know how many agents you’re going to need answering calls on any given day when you work in a call center.

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.

If you are in charge of training employees (or you are in charge of creating training materials) and your organization is planning on using ScreenSteps, you might be wondering how you will use ScreenSteps to train employees. So in this post, I’m going to explain how ScreenSteps can help you become an even more valuable as a teacher/trainer/content creator.

During the first five minutes of any software trial, you have to make one decision: Should I invest more time learning about this software or should I move on to something else? When you start your ScreenSteps trial, it's no different. You need to decide if ScreenSteps is something you should dedicate more time to learning about and whether you should use it in your organization. To help you make that decision, I recommend starting off doing five things.

When you begin authoring in ScreenSteps, you'll notice that the editor looks a little different than what you see in Word or Google Docs. In this video, I'll show you the basic ScreenSteps editor and how it will help you create better guides for your employees and your customers.