3 Ways to Reduce Training Time Using Technology

If you really want to reduce training time, we challenge you to look at the technology your agents are using.  Is it simple to use?  Does it proactively help agents?  Does it make their jobs easier?  If you didn't answer YES to all of those questions, you could be complicating your training efforts out of the gate due to the technology your agents utilize to manage the customer journey.  

One of the unsung heroes of SpiceCSM's Business Process/BPM tool is the ability to reduce the amount of time agents need to start producing at the levels of longstanding employees.  Typically when bringing new agents onto the team there's a period of training, usually involving some classroom knowledge transfer, exercises, role playing, and a variety of other methods to give the agents resources to solve requests efficiently.  Depending on the organization and type of business, this could take anywhere from 1 - 12 weeks, or longer.  In higher turnover environments this only exacerbates training challenges and emphasizes the need to make new employees more productive in less time.  Here are 3 ways you can utilize technology to help reduce training efforts:

1. INTEGRATION - One of the ways SpiceCSM helps reduce training time is by bringing as much information as possible into a single screen - essentially creating an overlay to display all that scattered information.  The interface, or how the information is presented, can be completely customized to make sure the information is exactly where your agents expect it to be; so training becomes more intuitive.  Eliminating the hunt-and-peck through external applications means that agents do not need to be trained on all those applications.  In many cases, agents don't even have to know the data is coming from another system.  Agents get trained on SpiceCSM and they automatically have access to all the connected data presented in an orderly manner.  But it's more than just getting the right data in front of the agents and streamlining the systems they need to access.
2. GUIDED PROCESSES - Business processes can act as guard rails for guiding people through their customer journey.  There are often many on and off ramps for those processes that might apply depending on what kind of customer it is, what information has already been provided, or a variety of other criteria.  Agents need to be trained, or at least equipped, to deal with those potentially subtle nuances so they make sure the customer takes the right journey.  By providing agents with intuitive, next-best-step guidance through a SpiceCSM customer journey we can take the onus off the agent to have to remember every potential process variance.  Simply put, SpiceCSM helps the agent by making their job easier and more intuitive so they can focus on the customer experience.  This will ultimately improve metrics like first call resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT), accuracy and efficiency. 
3. AUTOMATION - The final key piece to reducing training time is to automate tasks that might be repetitive, tedious, or critical parts of the process.  By automating those activities (or giving the agent the ability to trigger automated tasks), you're essentially taking those tasks off the agent's plate; so to speak.  The more processes that can be automated, the less training is required.  This is especially useful for more prescriptive tasks and processes that maintain a level of consistency. 

There are many solutions on the market to help deliver training content, however much of the training complexity actually starts with the technology being used by the agents.  It makes sense; if you have a lot of systems agents need to access or those systems are challenging to use, it's going to be harder and take longer to make agents efficient on that technology.  With SpiceCSM it's a combination of providing the right tools to make work intuitive and less training intensive, and automating tasks therefore eliminating training on tedious or repetitive tasks.  SpiceCSM effectively reduces the impact of technology on training. 

Don’t forget to head on over to our Blog to read more about the 5 Benefits of Implementing a UUI.  If you want to learn more about how SpiceCSM is helping transform organizations and customer experiences, or to start your journey contact us for more information.