Training & Development

Not all roads to WFM Training follow the same path. Here is some information to help you understand the characteristics and the differences amongst them. I. VENDOR TRAINING “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” —Benjamin...

Virtual training is here to stay! With many contact centers going hybrid or staying fully remote, how do you ensure training keeps people engaged, encourages interactivity, and effectively improves their skills? To find out,...

My first professional exposure to contact centers came in 2005, and it didn’t take long to fall in love with the industry. The pace, challenges, and mission piqued my curiosity and inspired me to...

The COVID-19 pandemic did disrupt the old normal of grabbing coffee and rushing into the office. Today it’s more like hitting the alarm and running to your work desk to log in to take...

This month, our blog readers were interested in a variety of topics affecting their centers. Leslie discusses the skill that is of the utmost importance for our remote workers--writing well. The pandemic has brought...

One of the key missions of banks is to help their customers understand their finances, and the choices and the products and services available, in order to help them make the best decisions. These...

Promises are the most personal and binding of commitments, and therefore are to be made carefully, kept fully, and broken only in the most extenuating cases and with thorough explanations. So, when a company, its...

It’s time to staff up for the holidays! Yes, it’s hot out there. But contact center managers know that winter is around the corner and what these holidays mean in their business: call volume...

2022 has been a pivotal turning point in the age of sales, risk, and technology. Traditional business-to-business (B2B) selling strategies, through inside contact centers and mobile in the field, have been replaced by data-driven...

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...

A call comes into my line at 5:50 pm, just 10 minutes before the call center closes, I do my greeting, and the caller requests to change his grandmother’s health plan selection. Assuming that he...

Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, employers, like contact centers, (known as “covered entities” under the law), have scrambled to understand how the act applies to them. Overwhelmingly,...

Today’s model for training, educating, and preparing our workforce is broken. The rapid acceleration of technology and changing workforce calls for something new. Workers today are disengaged and unprepared for work. But there are...

The idiom The New Broom Sweeps Clean is great for the New Year since it essentially means to get rid of the old and bring in the new. It appears in John Heywood’s 1546...

Throughout October, our blog readers have been looking to the future! Our top 5 posts this month focus on learning from the past and using these lessons to put our best contact center foot...

The world of contact center training is complicated. Trainers are responsible for helping the onboarding process run smoothly for new agents by delivering the best possible training program tailored to the training class and...

As a trainer, I’m usually good at reading facial expressions and body language to determine if someone is getting the point or needs a break before explaining the next concept. Our face-to-face new-hire training...

In the mad scramble to move more than 90% of our nation’s contact center agents to work at home, the focus was on technology—keeping our agents online, connected and maintaining service continuity. The next...

Contact Center Pipeline’s AUTHOR WALL OF FAME Mike Aoki is President of Reflective Keynotes Inc., a Canadian training company that helps contact centers improve their sales and customer experience results. Area of Expertise: Training contact center agents to...

Frontline agents are under pressure to perform in a role that has become increasingly challenging due to more complex products and services, constantly updating information, and an internet-savvy, informed customer base. It takes a...