Here are four more training drills to improve the communication, listening and empathy skills of your contact centre employees.
1. Empathy
Empathy is a vital part of how contact centres conduct business. The skills to support a client’s emotional needs are vital and it is difficult to teach, and contact centre agents often find it hard to empathise with the large number of customers they interact with. Create practice scenarios with uncooperative or rude customers, asking your trainee to consider why the customer may be impatient. The aim is to remember the customer’s personal life, and the stress they may be dealing with, in order to deal with them evenhandedly.
2. Team players
Everyone in a contact centre should be able to pull together and cooperate with each other to overcome obstacles and there are many benefits to working as part of a team.
Create games by dividing your employees into teams of four, and send each of them clues via email. When the four clues are put together, they reveal a theme. Get them to work together to find the theme, which emphasises just how important collaboration is.
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3. Communication between leaders and teams
Good leaders are involved in the teams they lead, and should know the staff they supervise and support on a personal level. It should not be anything too personal but ask leaders to go and find out something about their staff, such as their pets, favourite hobby or sports team. This creates a conversation opportunity, and can create a starting point for better relationships between teams and leaders.
4. Speak without repetition
Give your call centre agents a transcript of a standard interaction between an agent and customer. Invite a trainee to read aloud the transcript with you acting as the customer. Give highlighters to your class and ask them to focus on four words used by the agent; highlighting longer words and not regularly used words like ‘it’ or ‘you’. The challenge is to go through the transcript again, avoiding any of the words highlighted, and find new words or phrases to get the message across. This will help trainees think on their feet, whilst improving the versatility of their vocabulary.
