Learning & Development

Reflecting over the last two plus years, as contact centers worked remotely, learning and development (L&D) teams had to pivot so quickly to ensure that new hires, existing team members, and leadership were provided...

Three years ago, very few of us could have imagined a world where most contact center agents would be working from home. While some centers were dabbling with at-home agents before the COVID-19 pandemic,...

The COVID-19 pandemic stood the workplace on its head and in doing so, cleared workers’ heads as well. Offices shut down, jobs went remote, and work-life got recalibrated. Workers were freed from corporate routine...

I have spent many hours in Contact Centers of varied shapes, sizes, and purposes - both premise-based and remote. At times, I have been haunted by what I would “want” if I were a...

Every big leap takes the right timing, careful planning, intention, a clear goal, and focus. And there are many influences at play that ensure a “successful landing.” Yet there is an immediate imperative to...

During my time within the call/contact center industry I’ve had the opportunity to work on quite a few call center projects. I’ve noticed that some call centers were welcoming of my ideas. And some others...

Remember your driver’s exam? It’s been a while, but it likely went something like this: You read the driver’s handbook and memorized the rules of the road. Then you took your written test and...

The Professional Association for Customer Engagement (PACE) stands alone as the only trade association that provides advocacy, compliance, education and networking to the contact center industry. For over 30 years PACE, formerly known as...

Mentorship is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, thanks largely to millennials and social networking. Mentoring is actually an age-old development concept with references reaching back as far as Ancient Greece and Homer’s Odyssey. As...

In contact centers, the first 90 days is known as the critical make-or-break period for new agents. New-hires can quickly be overwhelmed with information about systems, processes, policies and procedures. Add to that the...

Many of this industry’s most successful leaders started out on the phones… and yet, many call centers still suffer from a reputation for being a dead-end job. True, most centers operate within a flat organizational...

The “School of Hard Knocks” is an idiom that means the (sometimes painful) education one gets from life’s usually negative experiences. It is contrasted with formal education and was coined by Elbert Hubbard in...