Enhancing Contact Centre Agent Skills Through Microlearning: Improving Customer Experience, Onboarding, and Reducing Attrition
We all strive for a more efficient and effective contact centre, and whilst AI, self-serve, and technology plays directly into this, voice still accounts for nearly 50% of traffic and customer interactions, therefore people still have a big role to play.
The training and onboarding of our people become even more crucial in today’s contact centre as we make the customer experience more digital. The easy transactional stuff is now taken care of by Chatbots or Interactive Voice Responses (IVRs), so the more challenging demands are fed to our agents. Queries may be more sensitive, complex and likely to be from a more vulnerable customer.
With more contact centres operating in a remote or hybrid environment, the way we absorb and learn must change. Gone are the days where we might put people through a few days training and then have floor walkers onsite to help embed the learning, answer questions or sit side by side whilst they put the customer on hold and talk through the response.
The learning environment has changed, therefore how we train and how we approach learning must change.
Studies show that engaging in smaller bitesize chunks of learning can have a positive impact on the retention of that learning, so, adopting more microlearning based methods can help.
What is Microlearning?
Delivering educational or training content in small, manageable chunks offers a powerful solution to improve knowledge retention which can help influence customer experience (CX), enhance agent onboarding, and reduce agent attrition, especially in the critical first year of an agent’s tenure.
How Does Microlearning Improve Customer Experience (CX)?
Microlearning by its nature is short and to the point, crystallising information into more manageable pieces. It can be interactive, a show-and-do style of learning, more hands-on and interactive, which we know has a better impact on knowledge retention.
This can help agents quickly grasp and retain essential information, allowing them to provide faster and more accurate responses to customers. This method has been shown to boost retention rates by *25% to 60% compared to traditional learning methods.
With higher levels of retention, this helps bridge competency gaps and creates osmotic learning. Ultimately this can lead to better service quality and higher customer satisfaction.
Microlearning in Enhancing Agent Onboarding
The onboarding process can be overwhelming for new agents, who must learn a vast amount of information in a short period of time. If we consider how microlearning can be used in this setting, it can help simplify the process by breaking down training into easily digestible modules. This varied content can be adapted to different learning styles.
This approach not only improves completion rates - *83% for microlearning courses versus 20-30% for traditional courses - but also makes learning more engaging.*
As a result, new agents can become proficient quickly, boosting their confidence and performance from the outset.
Microlearning Impacting Agent Attrition
High attrition rates are a significant challenge in contact centres, particularly within the first year of employment. Microlearning helps address this issue by providing continuous, bite-sized training that keeps agents engaged and reduces the cognitive load associated with traditional training programs.
Statistics indicate that microlearning can increase employee engagement from around *15% to 90%, and a significant number of employees prefer this method over traditional learning. Engaged and well-prepared agents are less likely to leave, reducing turnover rates and the associated costs of recruiting and training new staff.
So microlearning isn’t new, but I think as an approach in contact centres it is relatively underused. We sometimes adopt E-learning, but this can be a sheep-dip approach and isn’t always the best quality. How we design content for induction and how we test the effectiveness of short bursts of learning is reinforced with practical application and practice of the skill. Isolating and breaking down each step of the learner journey can have a significant impact on retaining knowledge and improving competency.
Summary
Integrating microlearning into contact centre training offers a strategic advantage by improving the customer experience, enhancing onboarding processes, and reducing agent attrition. The added benefit from a planning perspective is that these are easier to schedule and less likely to get pulled which provides a flexible, efficient, and engaging training solution that meets the needs of the team and the business in achieving better performance outcomes, a satisfied, stable workforce, and happy customers.
About the Author
Garry Gormley is an experienced contact centre consultant and founder of FAB Solutions who helps contact centres improve CS and Operational Excellence. He is also the co-founder of High Performing Culture, specialising in microlearning, leadership, and development. To reach out to him visit www.fabsolutions.co.ukor contact him on 07824995454.
