This is the third part of a series of articles devoted to the onboarding of call-center agents and managers. Don’t miss the previous ones: in the first part, we talked about preliminary activities, and in the second — about interviews.
In this article, we’ll cover the next stage — training. Read on to learn how to organize effective training for sales managers and contact-center agents.
Onboarding goals for agents and managers
The general idea is to start integrating a new hire into the company culture before they begin working independently.
Goals:
- Provide a level of psychological comfort for the newcomer that allows them to master the training program as effectively as possible and absorb the contact center’s operational culture. The company benefit: reduce staff turnover during training (for groups of 4 or more people, a turnover rate of 25-30% can be considered conditionally normal).
- Form a clear understanding in the newcomer of what behavior is desirable and undesirable from the organization’s perspective — in other words, “install” clear “rules of the game” in their mind.
Training structure
A newcomer should master three training blocks:
- Product
- Sales and customer service techniques, including scripts (conversation scripts)
- Working in CRM/telephony
This is the right order to teach them, but it is often broken. The logic is simple: working with CRM is a technical skill. With product knowledge and sales techniques in place, you can work even without CRM. In addition, training on the system tends to drag on, and there is little time left to build the truly necessary knowledge and skills within a limited course. That’s why CRM comes last. Another advantage is that CRM training is easier when the trainee already knows the product. If sales techniques are taught first, it can be difficult for the trainee to later “map” them onto the real product. So logically, product should come first, then sales, then CRM.
Requirements for a proper training plan
In our experience, 80% of companies either have no training plans or have poorly designed ones. Here are the requirements for a good training plan:
- For every 10-15 minutes of instruction, the plan should include a separate, specific item describing what is being studied, how it is being taught, and how the learning outcome for that item can be checked. In other words, for every 8 hours of training, the plan should contain 32+ items. Less detailed plans do not work.
- At least 50% (and ideally 70%) of training time should be devoted to skill development. Accordingly, theory should take up 30% to 50% of the time.
- Each new training day should begin with an interim check of the knowledge and skills learned the previous day. This is critical. Knowledge is checked with tests and surveys, while skills are checked with practical assignments. Skills cannot be checked with tests — that is a major mistake, just as you cannot test someone’s ability to ski with tests.
- The training plan should include short stories about examples of desirable behavior (this helps trainees adapt socially).
- For each 8-hour training day, the plan should include at least 6 practical exercises.
- There should be a final exam with clearly defined criteria for assigning a passing score: pass/fail.
- The training plan should not imply a “sit there, do nothing, and watch” model — this is a critical mistake that will filter out all proactive people by the end of training, while those who like to “sit and watch” will remain (negative selection).
- The training plan should be provided to all trainees at the beginning of training.
| What we check | How we check it | Passing score |
| Knowledge | At least 100 questions on the product/service | 95% fully correct answers |
| Skills | At least 10 assessment exercises, including at least 8 exercises simulating customer interactions | 8 or more exercises completed without critical errors |
Approval of the training plan
Make sure the training program is approved by the direct supervisors of managers or agents. It is very important that they clearly understand its content and can provide feedback and suggestions for updating and improving it, as well as, importantly, requirements for emergency changes. Otherwise, there is a far from zero risk that the training department will start handing over staff who are not fully prepared. That is why it is important for someone from the sales or telemarketing management team to be present in training sessions from time to time (every 3-4 months) in order to identify deviations between training and actual needs and give feedback to the trainer.
Training room
| Requirements | Notes |
| Wet cleaning and ventilation twice a day Provide a changing room. Coats and umbrellas dripping water in the training room are not funny. |
Trainees should know that cleaning is being done. It is a good idea to keep a cleanliness log near the entrance with the cleaning time recorded. This shows trainees the company’s attention to detail. Let me remind you: the example of how to approach any task, even something as simple as cleaning, serves as a cue to action for the trainee. By the way, especially in large organizations and companies that work weekends, make sure the restrooms are clean by the start of Monday morning shift. If the company requires indoor shoes in autumn, spring, and winter, trainees should wear them too. |
| Comfort | I once actually saw slightly warm radiators in a training center at a large bank in winter. And that’s far from an isolated case. Even though it seems like such a simple thing to provide. You need chairs with writing tablets |
| The walls should work | An additional motivating/adaptation factor:
|
Knowledge and skills roadmap
The knowledge and skills roadmap is an appendix to the training plan and should be handed to trainees together with it (or it can be issued in blocks as part of each training day). It is a table where the rows correspond to training exercises and the columns correspond to the skills that the exercises are intended to develop. Here is an example of a fragment of such a map in sales (if a “+” is placed at the intersection of an exercise and a skill, it means the exercise is needed to develop that skill):
| Exercises | Skills | |
| Getting past the secretary | Establishing contact with the decision-maker | |
| “Full name” | + | + |
| “I’ve got the right number” | + | |
| “Bridge” | + |
|
A roadmap is also created for service agents/managers. Ideally, a description can be attached to each exercise. The point of the roadmap is to show the trainee what they are doing, why they are doing it, and in what order.
A little useful fun
To shape desirable behavior in trainees, film a video similar to this one or use it directly (thanks to the team at MTS Ryazan). I recommend this video to everyone — it’s funny, clear, and memorable. It’s also short.
“Installing” desirable behavior
Another very good way is to “put an understanding of love for one’s country into trainees’ heads.” The idea is that during training, the trainer tells agents real stories from the company’s life that show which behavior is desirable and which is not.
Here is an example of such a story (by the way, it really happened; I can confirm it because I worked at the company where it took place):
Once, in one call center, two agents — women around 22 years old — were caught having rather unusual conversations with male callers: the text they were reading followed the script exactly, but the intonation… It was a real phone sex line. Both were asked to submit resignation letters “of their own free will.” The most interesting part was that when the employees were told they were being let go, they completely denied any wrongdoing, arguing that nobody had told them they weren’t allowed to talk like that on the line.
How many stories should you tell? In practice, around 25-30 different stories per training course is enough for newcomers to understand the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Motivation scheme during training
If the company pays a training stipend, the stipend amount should be tied to the completion of training tasks included in the plan. The payout amount can be adjusted using a coefficient such as “training tasks completed correctly on the first attempt / training tasks completed,” or training tasks can be classified by difficulty from 1 (easy) to 3 (hard), with fixed payouts for completing tests and tasks of each type. Roughly speaking: 100 rubles for correctly completing an easy task, 500 rubles for correctly completing a hard task.
The stipend should be paid in addition to salary after a full month of work if the trainee passes the final exam and is cleared for independent work. Training tasks should be listed in the “Roadmap.”
No lower cutoff is required, meaning there is no need to withhold the entire stipend if a certain number or percentage of tasks are not completed.
As an additional non-monetary incentive during training, simple rankings can be used — either by the number of correctly completed tasks (with separate sub-rankings for theory and practice), or by the number of points trainees score depending on the difficulty of the completed tasks.
Rankings should be used only with strong groups and only starting from the fourth training day.
If the company uses a ranking system for current managers, newcomers should not be included in that ranking after being cleared for independent work — it will demotivate them. You need to wait until they reach the target values for their individual performance metrics.
