Chapter 1:
Hit the Ground Running
Strategies to accelerate training's agility and efficiency
As the first line of defense against unhappy customers, agents have a need for speed. They need to gain expertise quickly to solve problems effectively. Plus, it's a challenge to access the key resources needed to communicate well and solve customer problems.
Then, factor in the high industry turnover and seasonal fluctuations that make onboarding agents a constant effort. What's more, updating training materials is often time-consuming, manual work. Who has time for all that?
All in, ramping up new agents, keeping them up to speed, and balancing their need for thorough training becomes even more important—and tricky.
In this chapter, we’ll explore strategies for accelerating the agility and efficiency of your customer service training so you can easily scale and adapt your team for changes.
The tools you choose have an enormous impact on your training’s potential. Streamlined e-learning tools help your team stay fast and nimble, while a cumbersome tech stack will only slow course creators down.
Prioritize the following needs when selecting your training software:
Intuitive authoring
Avoid bottlenecks. Choose a tool that makes it easy for users with any experience level to build, review, and update courses and create training that reaches end-users faster.
Built-in AI
More and more e-learning creators use AI to create training efficiently. Save time with solutions with built-in AI. This will allow you to cut back on time-consuming tasks like copying and pasting and focus on more strategic tasks.
Opportunities for engagement
The more engaging your training is, the more likely it will produce great results. Don’t let building interactive course elements slow you down—choose software that makes it easy for you to create activities, games, and challenging assessments.
Articulate's integrated AI Assistant allows you to create courses up to 9x faster, with built-in features for custom image generation, text and assessment generation, content polishing, and more.
With Articulate, we've reduced the amount of time to share information during onboarding by 50%.
Use the following digital training strategies to help your agents identify and understand pain points as quickly as possible.
Train agents how to quickly access customer information
To fix any problem, agents need customer context.
Use onboarding materials to show how to pull up customers’ names, order history, and other details in your CX tools so they can start solving the problem immediately.
Create digital job aids for key issues and processes
Whether agents have multiple years of experience or just a few days, they’ll inevitably need to review key issues or processes.
Create digital job aids for crucial content, such as procedures for dealing with angry customers, so agents can quickly access it.
Deliver quick-hitting microlearning
Rather than sending updates in a PDF or email, try something more engaging to help the material stick.
Create microlearning around the most common and important pain points so agents can complete courses on the go or in short bursts. This can shorten the time needed to complete training.
Language is at the heart of all your agents do. Whether they’re on a call, responding to a chat, or writing an email, their words matter.
Through your customer service training, you can help them find the right words right away, turning potentially negative interactions into positive ones.
Create training around your department’s brand voice and tone
Whether that tone is professional, quirky, witty, or inspiring, show agents how to speak in that voice and provide rationale for how it ties into company goals.
Pre-write sample responses for frequently asked questions
This not only provides an example of wording in your brand voice—it also allows agents to save time and energy for more complex queries.
We trained our team on the “voice” of our company: friendly, helpful, positive, and easy to understand. It’s rare to experience customers who want to talk to customer support—but when you have such a friendly team, it’s a bright spot in the customer’s day.
