Experts: learn about the benefits and challenges of e-learning.

E-Learning is an excellent and increasingly sophisticated tool to teach agents valuable new skills and upgrade their proficiencies and to educate them about new product and services, equipment and procedures. The method gives personnel opportunities to practice at their own pace so that they can bring up their own knowledge and skills to what is expected of them, and beyond.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

From a performance standpoint, e-learning delivers this training without requiring agents to leave their desks, thereby making them available to handle more contacts; they can be taught during slack periods. e-Learning is therefore also invaluable in training home-based and informal agents so that they do not need to travel into the centers, which may be hundreds of miles from their homes.

e-Learning is not, however, the universal answer to contact center training needs. There are strong motivational, inspirational, informational, reinforcement, and feedback value in live interactions both in-person and through conference calls or webcasts.

For contact centers, the challenge is deciding when and how best to apply e-learning. This month's article offers general insights on e-Learning from a wide range of training authorities in the contact center space. TMCNet will have a followup article with views from these professionals on technology and on applying e-learning to training supervisors, home agents, and 'CRM agents': those that answer the complex calls from customers who have been through self-service solutions.

Todd Beck, Director of Learning Solutions, AchieveGlobal

Because it's self-paced, e-Learning is great for knowledge acquisition. Agents can study when they want to, for as long as it takes each person. So if you just need to raise awareness about something, e-Learning might be your best choice.

But e-Learning doesn't allow for human interaction with real-time feedback from the other person. So if you are teaching soft skills, e-Learning works best when wrapped in live events. That might be a one-on-one pre-training meeting with the agent's coach to set expectations and guide the learning, and then a live skills practice session afterward with a couple of peers. Soft skills need to be practiced, and you don't want to have the first practice be with real customers on the phone.

My favorite example of this is the current US presidential election. All candidates have web sites to make voters aware of the platform and the latest news. But every candidate also holds daily, live meetings because they know the only way to change voter behavior is to connect in the human dimension, to experiment with ways to present information and get immediate feedback, and to help voters connect broad politics with their unique personal situations.

The driver for e-Learning is always cost reduction, and there's nothing wrong with that. In a business, if one medium is truly more cost-effective than another, it should win. But lower cost and "cost-effective" are not the same. We've had clients who implemented really well, with all the before and after activities that build commitment and allow practice. They could have further cut corners by using e-learning alone, but they saw the value in live wraparound events.

Some organizations might be using e-learning to try to appeal to millennials, but we've seen research both ways--that it does and that it doesn't make a difference to various generations. So, frankly, the decision to use e-learning is always mostly influenced by cost reduction. If e-learning were more expensive, many of those other drivers would be over-ruled.

Our clients use e-Learning for customer service, sales, and leadership development. They are also using technology to support the training--such as emails from leaders, PDFs of related articles and research, etc.

Simply put, an organization will not accomplish behavior change unless the supervisors coach and model the behaviors. That's true whether you use e-learning or classroom. If it's not important to my boss, it's not important to me. Having the supervisors lead the live follow-up practice and application sessions is an ideal way to position them as champions of the change.

e-Learning has one huge advantage over classroom in that if an individual agent needs additional help, the supervisor can easily and cost-effectively have the agent re-take the program--and at his or her own pace.

It's fascinating that 10 years after many call centers first started using web-based e-Learning, as an industry we're still learning how to better use it. In those 10 years we've all learned that the rules of behavior change still apply, and that there's no magic way to train agents.

Just like technologies of IVR, recorded responses, virtual call centers, and CRM, e-Learning continues to make call centers more efficient and more effective only as long as it's used for good, not evil.

Allyson Boudousquie, Director of Business Process Marketing, PerformanceEdge Group, Aspect Software

e-Learning is designed to improve and sustain the performance of agents and supervisors by delivering the right training and communications content at the right time to the right agent and supervisor without negatively impacting costs of operations. Therefore, it is best suited for contact center operations that require ongoing training and communications to prepare agents with the right knowledge, skill and behavior for customer interactions. e-Learning is the preferred method of training agents and supervisors on products or services, program launches, company policies and processes, HR information, call handling skills and other behaviors critical to job performance. Some specialized training functions ideal for e-Learning include Agent Productivity, Sales Optimization, and Collections optimization.

Instructor led training (ILT), also known as classroom training, will always have a home within the contact center as the need for big communications or face-to-face learning will continue to exist. However, ILT is not an effective means to change and sustain agent behaviors because it does not adhere to adult learning principles. Superior performing contact centers today leverage eLearning to change the game of training by pushing up to 80 percent of ongoing training content and 100 percent of the communications content to the agents' desktop. This enables adult learning, reduces the training costs and risks of training, and improves agent adoption of knowledge and skills.

e-Learning is best leveraged in communicating and training existing agents on the required skills, knowledge and behaviors required to optimize performance of that agent at the right time. Proper skills, knowledge and behaviors can apply to any aspect of contact center operations as it relates to agent performance, including but not limited to, business processes, issue resolution, customer satisfaction, cross-sell/up-sell, collections and any business initiative measured by agent performance.

If supervisors and team leaders take an active part in executing e-Learning, the contact center will realize greater competence and confidence in their agent behaviors and measured performance. Operationally, supervisors can monitor an agent's e-Learning assignments as well as their comprehension scores for each completed session to keep driving progress and ensure that the agent's knowledge is reinforced. Supervisors play a key role in ensuring that agents are adopting key concepts and to assist operations in identifying additional knowledge, skills and behavior gaps that can be bridged via eLearning.

Too often contact centers are trying to use the wrong tool to get training to the agents. That's why they are struggling to do so. It's simply too expensive to do instructor-led training or team huddles so it's vital that training be done at the desktop. Unfortunately, most corporate learning management solutions don't work in the contact center because training still has to be scheduled and is often cancelled based on service levels. The solution has to be nimble enough to adapt to the ebb and flow of call volumes.

Scott Kissel, Director, Learning Consulting and Curriculum, Convergys Customer Management

e-Learning can be effective not only for communications, orientation, and knowledge-based learning, but also for immersive, interactive learning of more complex concepts and skills.

Process, products, systems and soft skills can all be trained effectively in the context of the job using a performance based approach, with e-Learning.

e-Learning is well suited for situations in which learners are geographically dispersed, and situations in which learners require schedule flexibility for the training delivery. It is also well suited for compliance training, to ensure that the curriculum was covered in its entirely, with automated completion tracking and reporting.

Areas less suitable for e-Learning include environments where the technology infrastructure does not support e-Learning, namely where there are bandwidth constraints or lack of content caching, inadequate end-user hardware, and firewall issues, e-Learning does not work well in situations in which the content is unstable and requiring frequent updates, most notably systems training when there are frequent and substantial software revisions leading to high ongoing maintenance costs for content.