eCoaching Gets Results

The challenge with training agents is two-fold: It’s expensive. And also, it’s expensive. Yes, you read that correctly: agent training hits contact centers twice where it matters most—the bottom line.

Building a Training Process

First, every company needs to develop training content and then administer training, including delivery, grading, tracking, etc. There’s a large market for training and training tools, including Learning Management Systems, Consultants, Content Libraries, Content Delivery Systems and more. Some companies take on the challenge directly and build in-house capabilities to deliver training. Either way, it’s big bucks.

The Cost of Training

Second, training has an opportunity cost. Contact centers need to carefully balance an agent’s time. When an agent is in training, they’re not at their workstation interacting with customers. And with today’s workforce, it doesn’t take much before you’ve over-invested in training since employee turnover can be quite high—some employees might stay just 3-6 months on the job.

The Solution? eCoaching!

The catalysts for eCoaching are two-fold: the digital content revolution and new demands from empowered agents. First, the digital content revolution allows compelling content to be generated quickly and easily—videos, photos, audio recordings, slides and infographics. Consultants have long used these tools with ease. Thanks to the rise of content-generation tools, now everyone else can use them too. Second, empowered agents seek flexibility and variety in their on-the-job tasks and related activities. They’re used to owning their schedules and managing their time independently. Variation is not so much a demand as it is expected—they don’t want to sit on the phones for 8 hours a day. Instead, they want to contribute, learn, improve and succeed. These two dynamics—the digital content revolution and independence and variety in the workplace—are fully embraced by the millennial workforce that comprises much of the contact center staff today.

Advantages of eCoaching

In fact, many contact centers using Encore® have adopted eCoaching because it meets the needs of the contact center and the agent. From the contact center’s perspective, eCoaching has two advantages:
  • It’s designed to address a specific topic. This makes it easy to compose and simple to track agents’ understanding of certain subjects over time. Companies can reduce (or easily complement) the traditional “long form” of training with short, topical lessons, and use a variety of media to produce them.
  • eCoaching makes sure that the assignment is generated when it’s needed—not quarterly or in one-on-one meetings long after the interaction took place. And, contact centers can always manually assign eCoaching lessons to supplement assignments that were automatically generated by evaluation scoring.
From the agent’s perspective, eCoaching is also very compelling:
  • The short lessons appeal to busy agents, who can fit them in to small gaps between in-queue times and other daily activities, and prioritize them as needed.
  • The small scope helps agents focus on a single topic, rather than trying to remember every detail or correction from their last sit-down training session.

Build a More Efficient & Effective Training Process

eCoaching gives contact centers an extremely effective solution that can improve agent engagement AND is less expensive to deploy. Quality managers will love the idea of creating short, simple lessons and deploying them as needed, rather than spending large sums of money to create monolithic training sessions that take agents away from their primary job. eCoaching is a 21st century solution for an age-old challenge. Want to learn more about Encore’s eCoaching? Contact us today at 800.209.1271 or request a live demo.