How home working and artificial intelligence are redefining call centre agent training

Research by the CIPD predicts that automation and artificial intelligence will have a net upskilling effect on UK jobs, replacing low-skilled positions with more inspiring highly-skilled ones. And we’re already seeing that change with the growth of data scientists and other roles that work in tandem with artificial intelligence. At the same time, the COVID-19 crisis has forced many contact centres to fast-track home working plans, making it more difficult to execute a call centre agent training process.

On the face of it these two trends look like divergent lines. Yet, they both pose similar questions. What does this mean to agent training and development? And how can CX leaders and service teams best incorporate these trends within current HR strategies?

Artificial intelligence needs human empathy trainers

The first category of new jobs is teaching voice and chat bots how they should perform. At one end of the spectrum, empathy trainers help natural-language processors and language translators make fewer errors. At the other end, they teach artificial intelligence algorithms how to mimic human compassion and behaviour.

Next, part of Bradesco and one of Brazil’s leading all-digital banks, is a great example. When they created Bia, a female virtual assistant, they had to build a totally different knowledge base. Twelve months were spent teaching IBM Watson native Brazilian slang and a more easy-going dialect recognisable by hyperconnected millennials. That investment in new jobs saw Next acquire 300,000 clients within a year, 86% of who had not previously engaged with Bradesco.

Agents must have a richer skillset

With the rising use of artificial intelligence software and robotics for simple tasks and requests, agents are increasingly having to deal with more challenging customer interactions – whether they be more complex queries, or more emotional callers.

A Customer Contact Association survey of 800-plus senior customer service executives, managers and advisors identified four focus areas for future training and development plans:

• An ageing population and changing expectations
• Building trust in a technology-driven world
• Career progression and reward
• Flexible working and the evolving role of frontline agents

Going forward, 83% of responders felt problem-solving skills will be the most important attribute, while 68% said that agents need to be better equipped to show empathy and emotional intelligence.

Staying ahead of the curve

Even before enforced home working with the COVID crisis, many organisations were well down the path of replacing rigid classroom-like training with more flexible delivery models. Webinars (live and pre-recorded), self-teaching tutorials and other e-learning tools have become more widespread, allowing agents to consume training on-demand or during quiet periods, from their mobiles or desktops.

Listening to customers

At Genesys we saw how the market was evolving, listened to our customers and invested time to understand how contact centres used workforce engagement management products. Those ideas were fed into our development roadmap for Genesys Cloud. It’s now used as a virtual training delivery platform by many customers to:

• Analyse and replicate the skills, knowledge and attributes of top performers, and close performance gaps through targeted coaching and mentoring
• Increase speed-to-competency for new and existing employees, while lowering costs
• Give employees customised training, career mapping for future roles and insightful, facts-based feedback

Finally, while the adoption of new training models is essential for future success, this needs to be encapsulated within a wider strategy to keep agents motivated and engaged. We’ll dig into this topic in my next blog.

With its open architecture and APIs Genesys Cloud is purpose-built for deploying blended AI and integrating with third-party AI solutions. For more strategic approaches to CX in the contact centre, view the report How to deliver customer experience in the 2020s.