Overhauling onboarding and training processes for customer service recruits

It goes without saying, ensuring that employees are skilled, engaged and have the attributes to communicate with customers effectively is key to delivering an excellent level of customer service. When surveyed, customers who had a negative experience said that staff seemed uninterested, made excuses or were dismissive. On the other hand, those who had a positive experience felt listened to, understood and sympathised with.

As a result, skills such as good relationship management, ability to communicate across an increasing number of channels and problem-solving are a high priority for contact centre employees.

How we onboard and train our contact centre agents is vital. It not only clearly impacts on customer experience, but it also defines how we set our people up for success and early retention rates. Finally, it feeds into the overall culture of our contact centre, such as our teamwork ethos, the behaviours that drive success and being able to truly live and breathe our values.

Recognising the importance of this, we have recently overhauled our processes and created our training academy to ensure that we invest in our new recruits and help them to provide the very best levels of service.

The academy process

Once offered a place on the team, our new recruits now attend a ‘welcome week’ in which they complete engaging game-based learning, complete activities and build on their team work skills to get to know the other people they’ll be on the journey with. We believe it is so important to start our new recruits as a group, rather than individually as it gives our people an immediate support network.

In this first week, recruits are trained on the most common and straight forward customer contacts, which for us includes how to take payments and how to complete a home move. We do this so they have the confidence to take some of the more straight forward customer calls and don’t become overwhelmed by complex enquiries in their early days.

Following this, they make the important first step into our contact centre environment and begin taking simple customer calls supported by a dedicated coach.

Daily coaching sessions enable recruits to discuss anything they are struggling with and get support with this, as well as being vital for expanding knowledge and discussing progression and goals.

Skill sets are then consistently built on so that employees can deal with more complex calls and understand the policies and procedures in place. It’s important not to rush recruits into taking calls that may be difficult to resolve as this can damage the customer relationship and be a harmful experience for the contact centre agent.

Coaching is ongoing but reduced as recruits reach the end of the academy. Following the three-month period, recruits graduate from the academy and can move around various departments at Echo to further build on their skillset and utilise talents that stood out in the training process.

Evolving processes in line with industry developments

Digital transformation continues to take place in the customer service sector and the role and profile of a customer service agent is ever evolving. As a result, we must continuously revisit our onboarding and recruitment processes to ensure that they incorporate new channels of communication and place emphasis not only on the skills required but the personality attributes that make a great customer service professional.

The latest ICS report shows us the importance of listening to our customers, being in tune with their wants and needs, and building on our processes to ensure that they receive the highest level of service. In addition, listening to those who have taken part the training process, and learning from their experience is vital to continued improvement and success of the next generation of customer service agents.