How To Successfully Integrate E-Learning Into Your Contact Center By Shalesa Charron, Syntora Inc.

Written by Shalesa Charron, Vice President of Sales at Syntora Inc.

Call Centers are continually facing increasing complexity of the agent's work, rising customer expectations and corporate directives to increase revenue and decrease costs. These factors all demonstrate the need to repeatedly invest in ongoing training programs to increase productivity. As a result, contact center managers are always looking for new ways to effectively and efficiently deliver training to their agents. Paradoxically, recent statistics show that contact centers are spending less on training today than they were five years ago. This is most likely explained by the fact that contact centers have unique training requirements not easily met by traditional training approaches and by the inability to measure the effectiveness of most training initiatives and show how they directly increase agent productivity.

Recognizing that contact centers have unique training needs and a dynamic and constantly changing environment, training solutions have to deliver content quickly to the call center floor, packaged as training flashes or compressed training bursts. eLearning applications are designed to do just that - distribute training content electronically, directly to agent desktops.

An eLearning application consists of content creation, system management tools and a delivery system to push training content directly to agent desktops. eLearning is the most efficient training method for training large groups of agents in a contact center utilizing the internet and WAN to deliver interactive training on an as-needed basis. With the contact center's logistical challenges of scheduling hundreds of agents across multiple shifts into classrooms, eLearning provides companies an alternative to traditional learning. A good training program blends both traditional classroom training and eLearning. New hire and complex training is best handled in a classroom environment while eLearning is perfect for providing ongoing training, content flashes and highly targeted training.