Training for Cloud Contact Center Success

Many organizations are shifting their contact centers to the cloud, often as a way to take advantage of the superior security, reliability, flexibility, location independence and real-time updates offered by Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions.

However, as often happens with new technology rollouts, too many companies are skimping on training programs for their employees and managers that can aid in the effective use of the new systems. This oversight is highly likely to create difficulties down the road.

Learn how CDW can help you streamline workflows and optimize data in your customer engagement center.

Effective training programs are important not only to smooth the rollout of a CCaaS solution, but also to ensure that companies are positioned to unlock all of the value from their new tools. Without effective training, a cloud contact center can create confusion among agents and managers and leave company leaders in the dark about some of their most important customer data.

Learning a New Interface

Even for contact center systems offered by the same manufacturer, on-premises and cloud systems often have different user interfaces. Typically, companies that switch from an on-premises system to a cloud contact center are also switching from one manufacturer to another. This means that users will need to become accustomed to a vastly different interface. And as anyone who has switched from, say, an Android phone to an iPhone (or vice versa) can attest, a new interface is accompanied by a steep learning curve.

In your personal life, it might be acceptable to spend five or six months learning the nuances of how to edit your photos or make the best use of a voice-activated digital assistant. But organizations cannot afford to have their contact center agents slowed by an unfamiliar interface or process when serving customers. A few weeks of training before deployment can save months of headaches caused by unhappy workers (and, worse, dissatisfied customers).

Improving Monitoring and Administration

Customer data analytics has become one of the most valuable aspects of the contact center. But without effective training, managers often lack the knowledge necessary to optimize use of their customer information — or even, in some cases, to access it.

Managers need to be able to work nimbly with metrics around elements such as service-level agreements, call transfer rates, first call resolution, customer effort scores and net promoter scores. Organizations define these metrics differently, making a tailored training program even more important.

Understanding the Value of a Partner

In reality, the most valuable quality in a trainer is not an inside-out understanding of the technology being deployed. Rather, it is the ability to translate a new system into business language that managers and employees intuitively understand. A contact center supervisor needs to understand not only the reporting data for the CCaaS system but also how that data is presented within the workforce optimization system. By understanding the data coming from multiple systems, the supervisor can strive to improve those metrics that drive corporate objectives associated with customer service.

Companies that engage a trusted third-party partner such as CDW to lead their training efforts benefit from our experience with similar companies. Most business and IT leaders simply do not know what they do not know about their new systems. But we do. And by shoring up these gaps in knowledge and tailoring the trainer for a company’s specific needs, we can help position companies to make the most of their CCaaS solution.