Agent Onboarding: Automated Coaching Slashes Ramp-Up Time By 60%

New agent onboarding time is about 3 months. However, an agent’s average lifespan in one contact center is 6 months to 1 year.  

Considering the short stint, generating ROI is a significant challenge. One can only imagine the pressure to train new remote hires and expect early conversions. 

And that’s not all. Many organizations invest in remote call centers along with physical call centers. Which makes ramp-up time an even more critical problem.

Today, we’ll help you crack the fastest and most practical solution to generate ROI with new agents, irrespective of their location.

Watch ramp-up time reduction in action. Here you go!

Why do managers want to streamline the agent onboarding process? 

Before we jump right into the solution, let’s understand the incentive contact centers realize with shorter onboarding process time:

These incentives indicate that leaders must search for innovative ways to slash ramp-up time by at least 1/3rd.

Maximize car dealership business profits by lowering agent onboarding time.

3 Key Steps to a Successful Agent Onboarding

The ongoing training must consider the step-by-step process for new hires.

1. Overview of Company Policies and Procedures:  Start the process by ticking the most important point in the onboarding checklist. Clear training on company's policies, procedures, and expectations, including information on commission splits, lead generation, marketing strategies, and other relevant topics. Providing a clear overview of these policies and procedures will help new agents understand their roles and responsibilities, as well as the company's culture and values.‍
2. Comprehensive Training and Support: Training on the local market, legal requirements, and the company's systems for managing listings, contracts, and other documents. Additionally, a new employee may benefit from training on effective communication skills, networking, and marketing strategies. Regular catch ups with a mentor or supervisor can also provide ongoing support and guidance.
3. ‍Foster Positive Company Culture: New hires should feel welcome and supported from the outset, and the company should provide opportunities for team building. Positive company culture will play a key role in helping agents feel connected to the organization.

How to fix agent onboarding time and increase agent productivity?

Automated coaching is a smart contact center solution designed with the use case of increasing ramp-up time at its core. 

The platform primarily works on personalized peer-to-peer coaching. It detects areas of concern and assigns coaching instances automatically.

So, how exactly does automated coaching help in reducing ramp-up time?

1. Independent coaching sessions

Automatic coaching offers the freedom of coaching agents without any dependency on a coach or manager. Sessions are auto-assigned and auto-allotted to agents based on their call quality scores. 

Besides automatic assignment of coaching sessions,  managers and auditors can create coaching sessions and assign them to new hires or a new batch. Managers can assign specific topics and company modules with a completion date. 

And a tracking dashboard makes an effective onboarding process addition-it keeps both agents and managers accountable.

How can you create a manual coaching instance for fresh and existing agents?

2. Evaluate agent readiness

Only coaching customer service reps isn’t the ultimate task. Managers should be able to identify agents ready to face the customers on sales, support, and collections calls while getting onboarded.

Creating assessments on the Convin dashboard for new agents helps evaluate readiness on subject matters discussed. 

These standalone tests are added along with assigned coaching sessions to evaluate the understanding of a particular session or resource.

How to create an assessment?

• To create an assessment session, head to the Coaching Dashboard and click Create. You can choose to create a Coaching session or a standalone assessment. 
• To create it via a coaching session, click on the assessment tab and select the required assessment templates. 
• To create and add new assessment templates to Convin, kindly reach out to your dedicated account management team.

3. Track agent progress

A comprehensive and customized reporting suite can simplify your life.

The coaching progress report helps you analyze and track the coaching progress and agent coaching performance with the help of average coaching progress completion % and comparison.

How to track the progress of your new agents?

4. Robust and accessible knowledge base

“If you don’t have an intelligent knowledge base for agents to use, consider implementing one. New agents may have difficulty getting the information they need during a live interaction without a central source of information.”- Call Center Helper

The asset library is an additional tool to access resources at the early ramp-up stage.

The Library acts as a knowledge center for the team, with a central repository of all the essential resources to enhance knowledge and skill to handle the calls better.

Managers can add multiple files or resources in the custom-created folders enabling access to all new agents and assisting them with rich knowledge regarding their roles to perform better on calls.

Library, apart from multimedia files, also supports adding call snippets from the conversations. These call snippets are good examples of customer conversations to learn and increase CX across all conversations.

Would you like to help your new hires ramp up faster?

Scaling companies must invest in automated coaching platforms. Not only get 100% agent conversations audit across customer-preferred channels but also experience Zero human dependencies in coaching. Make your agents feel grateful for a targeted and scalable coaching solution that operates on software. 

Every contact center, to our knowledge, is deploying automated coaching to reduce ramp-up time. Would you like to experience it too?

FAQs

Q. What is agent onboarding?

Agent onboarding refers to hiring a new agent in the contact center. It’s the process of integrating a new agent into a contact center by filling out the required paperwork and ramping up on business and job requirements. It includes the period between signing the paperwork to the activation phase. 

Q. What is the use of a knowledge base in agent onboarding?

A knowledge base is a valuable tool in agent onboarding. It’s a central repository of information and resources that can be accessed by the agent anytime and anywhere. The knowledge base can contain a wide range of data including product manuals, company policies, SOPs, call scripts, industry regulations, and other relevant information that the agent may need to perform customer conversations effectively. By using a knowledge base, the agent can quickly and easily access the information it needs to answer customer inquiries or solve problems.

Q. What is agent onboarding in the BPO industry?

In the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry, agent onboarding refers to the process of introducing new agents to a company's operations and procedures–familiarizing them with the company's policies, products or services, and customer support processes. Agents receive training on communication skills, customer service, technical support, and other areas that are critical for customer service experience.

Agent onboarding in the BPO industry may also involve providing agents with access to relevant tools and resources such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, knowledge bases, and other support systems. In some cases, agents are seen shadowing existing agents, receiving feedback, and coaching from supervisors, and participating in simulations or role-playing exercises to practice handling customer inquiries and issues.

Q. What is onboarding in real estate? 

The onboarding process in real estate may differ from other industries in terms of the specific tasks and responsibilities involved, but the general principles remain the same. The real estate industry is unique in that it requires specialized knowledge of the local market, property values, and legal requirements, among other things. 

One key difference that we noticed in real estate onboarding is the importance of developing relationships with clients and partners. Effective communication skills, networking, and marketing strategies training play a vital role. 

Another unique aspect of real estate onboarding is the need for new agents to obtain their real estate license and become familiar with the regulations of their state or local jurisdiction.