Call center agents are the frontline ambassadors of your company – and very often, they are the only point of contact between your business and your customers. Needless to say, the quality of customer service they deliver totally depends on their knowledge, skills, and engagement levels. And effective onboarding is the foundation for setting your call center reps up for success from day one and building their knowledge, skills, and engagement.
In reality, though, employee onboarding is often overlooked – and not only in call centers. According to Gallup, nearly one in five employees report that their most recent onboarding was poor. In this blog, we’ll talk about the importance of call center agent onboarding and how incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into this process can make it more efficient, engaging, and personalized.
Why Does Call Center Agent Onboarding Matter?
According to the 2024 State of Employee Onboarding report from Enboarder, one in four people expressed dissatisfaction with their last onboarding experience, and one in three said they have a truly terrible onboarding story to tell. And what’s even worse, one-third of the newcomers with sub-par onboarding experiences started looking for new jobs immediately. Whether it’s lack of structure, inefficient use of technology, or anything else in between – many companies clearly struggle to onboard their employees properly.
Let’s take a closer look at why an effective onboarding process is crucial for newly hired call center agents, in particular.
Improves employee satisfaction and engagement
Call centers and contact centers are often obsessed with customer satisfaction. But very few actually understand that customer satisfaction is often a reflection of employee satisfaction. And a good onboarding experience creates a solid foundation for highly engaged and satisfied employees. In fact, based on the Enboarder’s report we mentioned above, employees who rated their onboarding experience positively were 46% more likely to express satisfaction with their job decision, while 42% reported feeling more engaged.
Increases productivity and gets agents up to speed faster
Better productivity and shorter ramp-up time are also the result of an excellent onboarding process. As we see from the stats above, 45% of employees reported that a good onboarding experience made it easier for them to perform their job successfully, while 40% stated that it made them more productive. On top of that, with effective agent onboarding, you can get your new reps up to speed faster – and that means they can start handling calls and resolving customer issues independently a lot quicker.
Reduces agent turnover rates and strengthens retention
It’s no secret that call centers have notoriously high employee turnover rates. According to research by SQM Group, while the industry standard for call center turnover is between 30-40%, in some call centers, the agent turnover rate is as high as over 200%. At the same time, a well-known study for Glassdoor by the Brandon Hall Group found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82%. Of course, when it comes to retaining call center employees, many factors come into play. But effective onboarding is a good point to start with because it’s where the seeds of retention are sown.
Improves CX and customer satisfaction
Lastly, a well-structured, comprehensive onboarding process equips your call center reps with all the knowledge and skills they need to deliver high-quality customer service from the start of their journey with your company, helping you improve customer experience and maintain high customer satisfaction levels. Considering that nearly 80% of consumers will jump ship after one bad customer experience (according to research from Qualtrics and ServiceNow), proper call center agent onboarding is a worthwhile investment.
How AI Can Help Call Centers Streamline and Optimize Agent Onboarding
AI agent assist solutions help agents build knowledge and confidence faster
AI agent assist solutions (also known as virtual agent assistants) can greatly speed up the onboarding process and help your newly hired reps gain confidence faster. While these tools are relatively new, they are already transforming the customer service industry, improving the experience for both call center agents and customers.
AI agent assist tools provide real-time assistance to agents right as they are handling customer interactions by offering reply suggestions, relevant information based on the conversation context, and next best actions. When agents are unsure of how to answer the question, AI agent assist solutions instantly pull up the necessary information from your integrated knowledge base and CRM system so your reps don’t have to search for answers manually, putting customers on hold.
Not only does it enable your reps to respond faster and more accurately, but it can also help them build their knowledge on the go. The best part is that it reduces the anxiety your new hires may have when they are just starting out and helps them navigate customer conversations more confidently.
AI speech analytics makes onboarding more efficient and personalized
AI speech analytics tools aren’t just great for automating and optimizing your call center QA process – they can also enhance your onboarding process and make it a lot more efficient. AI speech analytics solutions can analyze calls and evaluate agent performance based on specific metrics and criteria. And this can help you identify skill gaps early and better understand where your new reps struggle.
For example, you may discover that your new hires overuse negative language, fail to follow the required scripts, or have difficulties in handling specific types of issues. AI speech analytics software can highlight these instances so you’ll know exactly where additional coaching is needed.
These solutions can also automatically summarize calls and extract important insights from each conversation, including key points, action items, resolutions offered, customer sentiment, and more. Supervisors can then easily review call summaries instead of having to read the full transcript of each conversation or listen to the entire recording to assess call quality and track an agent’s progress throughout the onboarding process.
AI gamification makes onboarding more fun and engaging
Incorporating AI gamification into your call center agent onboarding process can make it more engaging for your call center reps by transforming boring onboarding tasks into game-like activities, such as earning points, badges, or rewards for completing onboarding modules. Gamified onboarding can also include leaderboards that show agents how they rank compared to their peers, naturally fostering a sense of competition. Overall, AI gamification makes the entire onboarding process feel less like a chore and more like a fun challenge for your reps.
And what’s more, you can use gamification beyond the onboarding process. For example, gamification can motivate your reps to maintain their performance metrics and KPIs like First Call Resolution (FCR) rates, Average Handling Times (AHT), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
The Human Side of Onboarding Remains Important: How to Make it Right
While AI can accelerate and enhance your call center onboarding, the human side remains equally important.
Create WOW moments for agents during the onboarding
WOW moments can truly turn an average onboarding process into an unforgettable experience for your new hires – and the impact is far-reaching. WOW moments do much more than just make a good first impression and help your new agents start off on the right foot. They help build a foundation for long-term success and satisfaction within the company. According to the Enboarder’s State of Employee Onboarding report, if they had a WOW moment during the onboarding, employees were:
- 2x more likely to say they felt fully informed, engaged, and confident during the onboarding experience
- 70% more likely to say onboarding made them successful in their role
- More than 2x as likely to say onboarding made them more productive
- 74% more likely to say onboarding made them feel they belonged
- 82% more likely to say onboarding made them feel happy
Help agents build connections and friendships in the workplace
In addition to creating WOW moments, the Enboarder’s research revealed that helping your new employees build personal connections and friendships during onboarding can significantly increase employee satisfaction and contribute to more positive onboarding outcomes. More specifically, those employees who made friends during their onboarding process reported feeling more informed, engaged, and confident.
Of course, despite the clear benefits of helping your reps build connections and make friends in the workplace during onboarding, that can be challenging if you manage a remote call center team where traditional face-to-face interactions are minimized. But there are still ways to help your new hires build meaningful connections with their teammates. Virtual coffee breaks, social hours, and group onboarding sessions are just a few examples to mention.
Provide ongoing training and support beyond the onboarding phase
As much as the initial onboarding is critical, continuous learning and development are essential in the call center environment. Regardless of how fast a new call center employee gets up to speed, you should always provide ongoing training and support to your reps beyond the onboarding stage. Here’s what your ongoing training program could include:
- Technical training on new software tools and systems that you introduce
- Training modules to refine critical soft skills (conflict resolution, empathy, etc.)
- Regular briefings on the latest product/ service updates
- Refresher courses on compliance and relevant industry regulations
- Personalized coaching based on performance reviews
- Team-building activities to improve teamwork and collaboration
Equip Your Agents and Managers with VoiceSpin’s AI Call Center Software
Effective new agent onboarding is absolutely critical to ensuring high levels of engagement, job satisfaction, and long-term retention of your call center employees. But the call center software technology your reps use every day is also incredibly important. Outdated systems, lack of critical features and capabilities, or clunky interfaces can negatively impact user experience. That’s why we’ve built the call center software platform that is easy to use and packed with all the basic and advanced AI-driven features, including:
- Advanced call management: VoiceSpin offers a full range of inbound call management features to enable your team to handle customer calls effectively. These include custom call routing rules, multi-level IVR, in-queue callbacks, and a lot more to deliver an excellent service experience.
- Coaching tools for managers: With real-time call whispering, call center managers can join in on active calls and secretly provide on-call guidance to newly hired reps without the customer on the other end hearing anything to enhance onboarding and boost your reps’ confidence from day one.
- Integrations with CRM systems: VoiceSpin’s call center platform integrates with 50+ most popular CRMs and business apps so you can automatically sync data between your systems and ensure your reps always have all the available customer information at hand when handling calls.
- AI speech analytics: VoiceSpin’s AI Speech Analyzer can monitor 100% of your calls to automate your call center QA process. You can also spot specific keywords used in conversations to ensure compliance and stay on top of your team’s performance by tracking custom metrics and KPIs.
- AI call summary: The AI call summary feature automatically generates accurate summaries of every call that include key points, action items, customer sentiment, resolutions, and other insights to help you assess call quality while saving your QA team hours of manual work.
Book a quick demo call to see VoiceSpin’s AI contact center software solutions in action and how they can help you improve your call center operations and deliver outstanding customer experiences.
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