Corporate Training Specialists

Who...

Are you?

• What is your purpose – What is your role? ie facilitator, trainer.
  
• Qualifications and Experience to Deliver Program - What are your qualifications? Have you created or facilitated a similar program? What can you draw from that experience?
  
• Agreements of Group - What fundamental agreements or groundrules need to be established to ensure successful training? eg. punctuality, fun, one person talking at a time.
  

• Relevance - How is the training of interest or importance to the participants.
  
• What do the participants know about this training? Have they been involved in this type of training before and from what experiences can they draw?
  
• Purpose - What is the purpose of the training for the participants and the organisation?
  
• Develop Rapport with Participants - Contact the participants prior to the training to stimulate interest and ‘break the ice’.
  
• Needs - What are the needs of the participants? How will this training meet their needs? A full needs analysis will need to be completed prior to program delivery.
  
• Qualifications and Experience - What level of management do these participants belong? Have they experienced training before? What terms, jargon, language will be understood by this group?
  
• Housekeeping - Advise breaks, bathrooms, refreshments and saftey procedures.
  

What...

• What are the goals/outcomes of the training? Establish participants goals/outcomes.
  
• What key areas will you cover? Give participants an outline of the key areas.
  
• What you will be doing differently. How this training is different to others or what is the process you will use.
  
• Reinforce concepts using - – personal experience, facts, statistics, examples, illustrations, analogies, anecdotes, mental pictures, repetition and restatement. Use real life examples that relate to participants’ workplace.
  
  

• Why have you chosen this type of training? Why is it the most appropriate?
  
• Why have these participants been selected?
  
• WIIFM (What’s in it for me) - Do participants understand direct benefits they will experience and gain at training completion?
  
  

How...

• What sort of strategies and resources will you need to ensure that your audience achieves the “what” which you have defined?
  
• Pitch training to match participants’ experience and qualifications.
  
• Draw on participants’ experience where possible and integrate these capabilities.
  
• “Check in – at different stages of training to ensure you are achieving the results by reviewing the agreed goals.
  
  

Manage the Group:

• Manage discussions – ensure all discussions are relevant and do not go over time. Use tools to curb irrelevant discussion.
  
• Resistance – use strategies to lower the barrier to learning.
  
• Give the group responsibility to help enforce housekeeping rules and group agreements.
  
• Establish a parking bay for questions that you or participants want to cover later. Ask the group to take responsibility for these.
  
  

When & Where...

• What is the optimal time length for training? What time management mechanisms can you put in place to ensure this is adhered to?
  
• Know when to start and stop. What topics are likely to generate discussion, what key points need time for group work?
  
• Know the venue – appropriate size, acoustics, flexible furniture, lightness/darkness of room, location of power points, light switches, air-conditioning, bathroom facilities, contact person if problems with venue.
  
• Know your presentation equipment – what type of equipment you need, how the equipment works, where equipment can be located in an emergency.
  
• Prepare for the unexpected. Ensure you have contingency plans for all your resource and presentation material.
  
  

• Review goals – explain how the goals have been achieved.
  
• Tie in to workplace. Where can participants use these skills?
  
• Offer assistance post training.
  
• Conduct evaluation procedure.
  
  

The call centre industry continues to be one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The cue has been given for management to maintain and keep pace with this growth with Best in Class (BIC) performance.

For an organisation to maintain a competitive edge, to maximise profitability and efficiency it must be up there with the best.

When an organisation measures its own business processes against those that have been identified as BIC it can readily identify opportunities for improvement.

Whether large or small, old or new, in the competitive call centre industry it is vital for an organisation to know where it sits with regard to world’s best practices.

Benchmarking is the comparison and measurement of the four P’s; practices, policies, philosophies and performance measures against those of high performing organisations world-wide.

Through benchmarking an organisation’s management team is able to clarify the organisations strategies and objectives across a broad range of call centre operations.

Benchmarking coaxes managers into regularly reviewing all areas of performance and not just productivity outputs.

The qualitative nature of benchmarking surveys and reports make them particularly beneficial. Dennis Sanner manager of benchmarking services with the AQC, told Telcall magazine in May 2000, ‘The benchmarking studies and networks that AQC run are more qualitative in the sense that we’re really benchmarking processes or methods that other organisations are using rather then just the end results.’

More and more organisations are seeing the real benefits of participating in benchmarking activities and credit it’s existence for helping them to not only see the ‘bar’ but to jump over it to success.

With a 22% turnover rate across the call centre industry signifies the high levels of job dissatisfaction with working in call centres. This can be linked directly to poor performance appraisal and measurement systems and HR policies that fail to address the roots of high staff turnovers.

Gone are the days where a call centre was seen as an overhead that simply takes orders and handles complaints.

Call centres are one of a company’s greatest assets. Maximising the potential of your call centre significantly increases its ability to reach its true profitability.

Traditionally performance measures have been based on quantity such as call volumes, this results in reduced staff empowerment, quality and customer problem resolution issues.

The call centre of today needs to focus their key performance criteria on quality allowing empowered employees to maximise the value of every customer interaction, ensuring the call centre becomes a profit making asset. So how can we turn it around?

Companies should undertake a staff diagnostic survey to uncover weak HR and performance management practices.

The survey needs to be tailored to individual companies but in general cover the following issues:

• Leadership and management styles
• Communication and the flow of information
• Organisational commitment
• Work stress and work load
• Internal customer service
• Job satisfaction

Trust in management

A management consultant can help you on the road to maximising your call centre profitability and remember, a satisfied CSR creates hundreds more satisfied customers than the company had before!