Training & Development

When trying to meet and improve service level agreements, reviewing agents’ performance and providing adequate training is imperative for success. Unfortunately, making time for agent...

In the Contact Center Challenges & Priorities Report released last month, contact center leaders revealed that one of their top priorities for 2016 is...

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...

The world of contact center training is complicated. Trainers are responsible for helping the onboarding process run smoothly for new agents by delivering the...

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...

David Merrill, renowned educator and coauthor of Reclaiming Instructional Design, defines instructional design as a “technology that incorporates known and verified learning strategies into...

Wait a minute, if it’s 2015, shouldn’t we have flying cars by now? Much to the disappointment of Marty McFly from “Back to the...

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...

Training and coaching are two different approaches, but people often use the words interchangeably—and even worse, they use the tactics interchangeably. Let’s clarify our...

Which types of contact center training produce the best ROI? In our recent Contact Center Training Special Issue, we asked experts from the leading...

“Congratulations! You have been promoted to acting supervisor.” It was 1993 when my manager pulled me aside and gave me the good news. I...

Training can be one of the biggest costs in any contact center. If you take several hundred (or thousand) agents and multiple that by...

Education expert Bernard Bull once said, “In order to create an engaging learning experience, the role of the instructor is optional, but the role...

It’s an unfortunate reality in many companies that staff development becomes an easy target anytime the budget needs to be tightened. Once training resources...

When I managed the call center training department at a major wireless phone company, we invested six weeks in our new-hire training and coaching....

One of the most vital components of any contact center is the training department. No matter what kind of center you operate, it’s critical...

The idiom “fine art” (first half of the 1800s) is defined in the “American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms” as “something requiring highly developed techniques...

Nothing can short-circuit an online class faster than “technical difficulties.” I’ve seen so many talented facilitators prepped and ready to deliver their carefully planned...

“They are just temps,” said one contact center manager describing his seasonal agents. “They will be gone in a couple of months!” That condescending...

Dealing with irate callers can wear down even the most motivated agent. That can result in burnout or turnover. Since the cost to hire...