Nationwide dials up training for call-centre staff

Citation

(2005), "Nationwide dials up training for call-centre staff", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 37 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2005.03737aab.002

Nationwide dials up training for call-centre staff

When the UK’s largest building society needed to train staff for its network of regional call centres, it decided that a logical way of delivering the necessary skills was…over the telephone.

The Nationwide’s regional call centres are designed to supplement the services of the society’s two main call centres, in Swindon and Nottingham. These centres employ hundreds of staff, trained face to face by instructors working in classrooms. But in order to meet the needs of the new regional centres, the Nationwide had to find an efficient way of introducing new staff and managers across the country to basic call-centre skills and to the Nationwide customer culture while maintaining an acceptable level of service. The society also needed a training approach that involved managers to a greater extent in transferring learning into the workplace.

Training company 3C Associates devised a pilot telephone communication-skills course led by a remote instructor. Using a conference call, practice tapes and training-support materials supplied in advance, eight Nationwide delegates and a manager worked through four half-day sessions over a two-week period. (A traditional Nationwide course runs over two consecutive days.)

The telephone-based course had the same objectives as Nationwide’s traditional face-to-face training. It covered:

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  answering calls in the Nationwide style, using positive language;

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  why rapport with the customer is important, and how to build it;

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  collecting information from, and delivering product information to, customers; and

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  handling difficult customers.

“Delegates enjoyed the chance to practise skills over the telephone and had to commit to specific tasks between sessions,” said Jo Hussey, Nationwide learning and development consultant. “Managers liked the training sessions because they reinforced the coaching skills they use every day.”

The instructor reviewed delegates’ individual progress, giving feedback over the fortnight. The experience of being trained over the telephone by a remote trainer gave delegates the confidence to handle clients they never see.

“I now know how to structure a call properly,” said one delegate. “I appreciate how important voice tone can be and I have the confidence to handle complaints and difficult calls effectively.”

One manager who had been deeply involved in the session, listening to voice tapes and capturing team information on flipcharts, commented: “Having heard my staff practise new techniques, I now understand a lot more about them.”

Hedda Bird, 3C Associates managing director, said: “Up to 40 per cent of the cost of a traditional, external training course is taken up by travel and accommodation. Moreover, external training takes the employee away from the job for an entire day or more, affecting productivity. The challenge was to find a way of training people remotely that would deliver high-quality learning and engage participants in the same way as off-site training courses.

“We initially tried web-casting, but found that the one-way nature of this technology and the lack of interaction both with the trainer and with other participants made this training less effective. What was needed was a technology that was readily accessible, easy to use and that would enable real-time interaction so as to recreate the ‘classroom feeling’.

“It occurred to us that the easiest way of achieving this would be over the telephone. Everyone has a phone and we are all at ease with talking to people over the phone. Audio-conferencing was the obvious solution.

“Participants can ask questions and get immediate feedback. They can hold discussions with other participants or join in role-playing exercises. And instructors can test participants’ understanding as they go along, enabling them to adjust better to their needs.

“What is more, we have found that you can condense half a day of classroom time into two hours, because people are much more focussed on the phone.

“The client was truly surprised at the lively interaction on the courses, and at how productive a conference call could be. This was diametrically opposed to some people’s experience of conference calls at work, which can be unstructured, long and inefficient.”

Course tests and quizzes showed that the Nationwide delegates achieved higher scores with remote training than they had in traditional classroom settings.