Recruiting and onboarding new staff in line with social distancing is uncharted territory, but using cloud contact centre solutions can get you off to a good start. Thomas Rødseth of Puzzel and John Bhairoo of Black & White Recruitment share a five-point plan for success.

According to comparison site Finder, 60% of the UK’s adult population is currently working from home (WFH) during the Coronavirus lockdown. It is a trend that is likely to continue as a result of the ongoing health crisis. At the same time, many companies are beginning to look for fresh talent to push their businesses forward and start planning for the future. As a result, employers will find themselves in the fairly unique position of onboarding new staff members remotely rather than in person or at the office. For contact centres still inundated with customer calls, how do they transform novice agents into fully fledged members of a high-performing team as quickly as possible?

Be prepared

Managers have a critical role to play in creating an end-to-end onboarding process that is welcoming and productive. Nothing is more demoralising than a ‘sink or swim’ attitude. Therefore, make sure new starters are engaged from the time they accept the job offer by fostering an inclusive environment where new agents flourish and quickly adapt to your contact centre’s culture.

Send new employees a welcome email a week or two before they begin with details of what to expect when they arrive, or login, along with mugs, T-shirts and other promotional accessories plus links to videos or a company handbook by way of introduction.  In addition, use video to introduce other members of the team. Colleagues could produce pre-recorded introductions sharing something interesting about themselves and what they do, including how they are set-up to work from home (WFH) and fun things such as how their pets are part of the team. Consider buddying new recruits with a mentor who is on hand to answer quick day-to-day questions and illustrate contact centre culture.

In the new world of WFH, access to good IT tools and support is vital. Check whether the new starter has adequate Wi-Fi. If they are using their own laptop or mobile phone, help them understand your IT policies especially when it comes to security. Leave yourself plenty of time when placing IT orders so new recruits can be fully integrated and get off to a flying start.

Make the most of collaborative technology to create an enjoyable and informative onboarding experience. Set up video calls with key people in the business and organise a virtual lunch to welcome them to the team. Face-to-face screen time decreases feelings of isolation and builds trust, but don’t overload new agents and remember to ask for feedback so that you can improve the onboarding process for other new joiners.

5 Ways technology can make a difference

When Puzzel surveyed over 100 contact centre professionals, ‘IT issues and/or clunky technology’ were major barriers to agent happiness (at 71%) so give new agents the right tools to do their job from the off-set.

• One single solution, instant results – cloud contact centre solutions integrate seamlessly with corporate databases, CRM and social media tools so that new agents can find all the information they need to deliver a first-class customer experience quickly and with minimal training. What’s more, the latest agent applications are innovative in their simplicity. They bring together all communication channels in one place, providing new agents with a single view of customer interactions and enabling them to receive and respond to customer enquiries by telephone, email, SMS, social media and web chat

• Let Artificial Intelligence (AI) do all the thinking – maximise AI learning from the contact centre to provide agents with the real-time knowledge they need to resolve customer interactions without switching applications or resorting to pop-ups. New recruits might be home alone but using chatbots through either speech or text can help them find answers to customer queries and suggested responses quickly and easily.

• Build confidence with Silent Monitoring – silent monitoring has long been a valued training tool for new starters and most vendors today embed some kind of silent monitoring functionality into their core contact centre solution. This allows managers to listen to agent calls and provide instant feedback to new recruits including both praise and advice to quickly build confidence and take them to the next level of experience, wherever they are located.

• Make learning fun – incentives, competitions and rewards have always been a popular method of motivation in contact centres. The only difference now is that technology can automate the gamification process, making it a great way of educating and motivating new starters, especially remotely. When all your agents are working from home, shift the focus from individual to team performance for greater inclusivity. Virtual gamification has the added bonus of reducing onboarding time while making learning fun.

• Workforce Management – combining work with domestic duties is difficult enough for the most confident, seasoned members of your WFH agents so imagine how daunting the process is for newcomers. WFM is a great way to create a supportive environment that minimises stress levels. Use it to build flexible schedules in the early days, ensuring new recruits have enough time away from customer-facing duties to benefit from training and plenty of opportunities to get to know their colleagues via informal online chat or videoconferencing facilities.

Puzzel’s partner, John Bhairoo from Black & White Recruitment believes it’s hard to replace the energy of being surrounded by colleagues in a contact centre, however, it is possible to recreate a positive atmosphere and culture by using the right onboarding techniques and communication tools.

For more ideas on how your organisation can address remote onboarding download a copy of the Puzzel survey “Agent Wellbeing: What Makes your Team Tick?” or visit www.puzzel.com.

About the Authors

Thomas Rødseth is Chief Technical Officer of Puzzel.

John Bhairoo is Director of Black & White Recruitment.

Puzzel is the leading European Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) provider.  Puzzel offers a native cloud, fast to deploy and easy to use Customer Service Platform for contact centres of all sizes.  The Puzzel Platform consists of a fully integrated omnichannel and artificial intelligence enabled Contact Centre solution, advanced email and Ticketing and Workforce Management.  In addition customers can personalise the Platform using technology partners from the Puzzel Marketplace.  Puzzel was recognized as a Challenger in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant report for Contact Center as a Service in Western Europe for the fifth consecutive year, reflecting its rapid growth, functional breadth, product innovation and commitment to customer service and support.  For more information, please visit www.puzzel.com

Derek Jones, VP Enterprise Strategy, Americas at Deputy outlines the steps call centers need to take for quick onboarding of new employees.

Facing a crisis is inevitable in every industry, and the key to facing the time of crisis effectively is preparation. Businesses who fail to create an actionable crisis onboarding plan set themselves for failure. Nowadays, the world is facing the most significant shutdown in history called COVID-19, and the fact is we haven’t been prepared to face a global pandemic that, in a matter of weeks, changes everything.

During these times, call centers are experiencing huge spikes in income calls, and it’s not a surprise that even the most prominent companies face difficulties. For instance, customers who’re trying to reach the most influential banks such as Wells Fargo & Co., or Bank of America experiences up to three hours of hold or connection issues.

It is evident that call centers hold the first line during the crisis, and it’s crucial to prepare your business to handle a surprisingly high surge in calls. Since the volume of calls will most likely grow, you have to plan a quick onboarding of new workers to support the business in tough times.

Here are 5 actionable tips you can implement now to quickly onboard new call center workers in times of crisis.

#1- Create a Knowledge Database

If you’re handling hundreds of customers on a regular day, it’s important you can solve their problems or misunderstandings fast to provide excellent customer service. That’s where a creative knowledge database comes handy and here are a few tips for creating an adequate knowledge base:

• Study your audience and learn about their needs
• Analyze the most common problems or questions your customers face and provide a detailed solution in the form of FAQ
• Always create templates that will help your call center workers to standardize their answers
• Create a structure and organize your knowledge base. If you’re supporting your customers on how to use your all-in-one SEO tool, don’t forget to categorize your knowledge base for easier and quicker access to information. For example, ‘off-page SEO’ -> ‘link building’ -> ‘no-follow backlinks’. That way, your workers can immediately access the specialized knowledge database which will increase the speed of solving customer’s problems
• Create different roles and permissions which ensures that not everyone can publish into the knowledge base without the prior review
• Listen to your customer’s feedback and continuously improve

#2- Introduction to Key Tools

Every call center is different, so are the work processes and tools that support these. Introduce new employees to the fundamental tools from the very beginnings, so they understand how to use these tools effectively in supporting their day-to-day activities. For instance, call centers lose resources on scheduling shifts, managing teams, and employee absence. If your business uses automated shift scheduling systems or centralized communication tool, it’s crucial to explain to new employees how to use these tools effectively.

It can take time for new workers to get used to a new tool or working environment, so it’s crucial to provide them with the knowledge that actively supports in understanding new tools and its features. You can create detailed video tutorials by senior call center workers who explain the essential tool features or tool walkthrough showing real scenarios and ways to utilize key features.

#3- Implement an Interactive Training

During the crisis, aim to prepare new employees as fast as possible to serve a spike in demand efficiently. It requires specialized training, but since time is a critical factor in every crisis, you want to have an interactive training system in place. Consider implementing an interactive training system where the new employees face specific real-life scenarios and have to find a quick solution. Learning by doing is one of the critical aspects of rapid onboarding in times of crisis. There are many creative ways to train your new employees in a dynamic environment during the crisis.

One of the ways to implement interactive training is by using a knowledge database and select the most common questions, problems, and scenarios. Once you’ve identified these, you can perform a set of various situations that present different queries and new employees have to solve it efficiently. In the end, you can even implement a feedback or rating system that helps employees to learn from their mistakes and provide excellent customer service in the future.

#4- Use Gamification to Increase Learning Motivation

Gamification is quite a new concept of learning that increases motivation, satisfaction, engagement, competition, and participation of students. If you’re looking to train highly motivated and engaged employees, which is crucial in crisis times, you should consider spicing up the education process by adding a game feel to it. You have to be creative if you want to onboard highly talented and motivated people to your call center, and here are a few ideas:

• Instead of merely giving the grades, introduce new employees with an experience points system which increases the sense of accomplishment and purpose
• Use the badge system that proves to be useful in learning new skills on major e-learning platforms such as Khan Academy
• Spice things up and create a tournament for new employees
• Introduce leaderboards

#5- Encourage Peer Mentoring

Call centers are a fast-paced and dynamic work environment where employees usually work alone on solving customers’ problems, which can lead to a feeling of isolation. It can further lead to an overall sense of insecurity, which is counter-productive for call centers. Encourage peer mentoring in your company as it won’t only help new employees solve problems more efficiently, but also it gives a sense of organizational culture and a deeper understanding of business processes, which results in higher motivation and satisfaction.

Be Creative and Act Fast in Times of Crisis

In times of crisis, it is crucial to act fast and have a creative onboarding process. Establishing a self-sustaining information flow is essential, especially for new employees who might feel overwhelmed by the new environment and amount of information. The interactive and gamified learning approach can increase employees’ happiness, satisfaction, and motivation, which is critical in handling the crisis.

 About the Author

Derek Jones spearheads key initiatives at Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets and communication.  With a focus on Healthcare, Derek helps business owners and workforce leaders simplify employment law compliance, keep labor cost in line and build award-winning workplaces. Derek has over 16 years’ experience in delivering data-driven sales and marketing strategies to SaaS companies like MarketSource and Griswold Home Care.

Successful teams are made up of the right people. This is true in sports and it is true in customer experience work.

While larger companies are able to build a team of many people, it is typical to have a customer experience team of just a few or even a ‘team of one’.

In situations where it is a ‘team of one’, do everything possible to find the person possessing as many of the components listed below.

Components of successful Customer Experience Teams

• The people on the team must understand and embrace what CX is and what it takes to see success.
• They must be passionate about CX and the way it will improve the way the company works with their customers and the way they’ll be better able to engage with customers.
• They have to understand the specific goals of your CX program and the benefits to both the customer and the company.
• Your CX team needs to be self-motivated and driven. Especially if the team is new, they will be charged with educating everyone within the company how CX works and what their individual impact will be.

But be very clear on this: your CX team can be as motivated as they want to be, but they must be supported and encouraged by the leadership team.

Without this, most efforts will be fruitless and “just another thing we have to do.” CX work will drive most of the decisions you make as a company, so leadership must be on board and support the team in their efforts.

When selecting your CX team, be sure to consider that CX work incorporates both ends of the typical spectrum: data and emotions. The data often indicates a change in customer engagement or behavior patterns.

The people on the CX team need to complement and challenge each other from both the data and the emotional levels. As in your company culture, you need to hire for the right fit, but not clones of one particular personality type. They need to advocate for the customer and the business from the standpoint of making the customers’ world better.

About the Author

Kristina Evey is improving the way companies connect with their customers and increase their profits, she is an accomplished speaker and trainer on customer satisfaction and retention.

Most of us can remember being a new hire at some point in our professional career. Despite having the experience and or qualifications required for our new position, there’s still a bit of apprehension when one finds him or herself in this situation.

It’s important for an organization to assist new hires in gaining confidence as this can certainly have an impact on a customer’s experience.

Here are three tasks that I call the I. E. E. method of helping new hires be successful.

I = Indoctrination – In order to get a new employee off on the right foot, I think it’s necessary to indoctrinate the person into the culture of the company. This should include the company history, core values, the present company goals and how their position fits into the company reaching it’s goals.

If possible, arrange for departmental managers to speak with the new employee on the services their respective departments provide to the organization. Allow for the new employee to spend time in each department (where possible) to get the “big picture” perspective of the organization.

E = Education – This step helps the employee perform at the highest possible level. Equip new hires with the necessary tools to be efficient and effective in their position. Provide product/service knowledge training, Allow the new hire to experience the product/service first hand to get the customer’s perspective.

For those new hires that will not be customer facing employees, allow them to spend time with employees who do interact with the customer. In doing so, they more than likely will develop a sense of appreciation for customer service personnel and get a better understanding of customer needs and requests.

Create opportunities for them to spend time with others within the organization who are impacted by the new hire’s job duties and with those who impact the new hire’s position. Doing so helps the new hire to understand the needs of his/her internal customers. Make sure the new hire has received training with the tools required to perform daily tasks – internal systems, software, hardware or whatever the employee will use in fulfilling their position requirements. Remember to provide steps for task completion as this gives the new hire a sense of having the ability to accurately complete tasks.

Knowledge plus repetition usually equals success. Be careful not to rush this step. Think about the long-term impact that you want this new hire to have upon your organization and your customers. My Dad used to say “Haste makes waste boy!” when I would get in a hurry to complete tasks. He knew that mistakes usually happen when one is in a hurry. Take your time when educating new hire personnel. Your organization will reap the benefits!

E = Evaluation – After indoctrinating and educating new hires, it’s time for evaluation. Advise new hires of the evaluation process. Let them know you’re interested in their progress as a new employee. It’s important to provide feedback to new employees. Set and keep evaluation/feedback appointments. I suggest weekly sessions for the first ninety days. Encourage the new employee to ask questions during these sessions.

Observe the new hire “in action” and reinforce successes with on the spot affirmations. Where the new hire works in a team environment, get objective feedback from teammates. New employees must be kept in the loop regarding their progress up the learning curve. Their ability to reach the top of that curve is dependent upon the receipt of regular performance evaluations.

A new employee is dependent upon an organization for assistance in successfully performing the duties for which they were hired. Use the I.E.E. method to ensure they get off to a good start! Your customer is depending upon it!

About the Author

Recognized as “one of seven useful Twitter people for retailers to follow” by Mystery Shopping Experts of the UK, Customer Service Speaker, Author and Consultant Errol Allen utilizes his 25+ years of practical hands on experience to assist organizations in developing customer service strategies for maximum customer retention. Errol believes that a systems mindset is critical to an organization’s success in providing great customer experiences.