How to Cut Costs and Boost Effectiveness: The Advantages of AI Training for Customer Facing Agents

There’s a lot riding on your call center and BPO training, especially now, when budgets are tight. If you’re looking for ways to improve training, shorten the time it takes to prepare competent agents, and drive up agent performance, there’s a two-letter solution for that: AI. 

Yes, artificial intelligence (AI) is a buzzword, but it’s buzzy because it really works. AI training for call center and BPO teams can provide more effective training at lower costs. Ready to learn how? Read on for the 7 ways that AI training cuts costs and improves effectiveness for call center and BPO agents. 

Train more agents without adding resources

The best way to train agents is through role plays, but few call centers have enough managers to allow agents to practice sufficiently. The only way to onboard more agents is to add more managers, trainers, and coaches, and that means more expense. 

But AI can produce as many realistic role play personas as you like, and each one can support as many agents as you need. AI algorithms automatically assess agent performance and provide comprehensive reports, removing the need for trainers to do so manually. 

AI trainers don’t need a salary and cost very little to generate, helping call centers and BPOs to train more agents without adding more resources. AI training platforms can also analyze training data to identify trends and areas of improvement, and then guide managers to allocate training resources more effectively, prioritize training initiatives, and address skill gaps proactively.

Slash time to proficiency

The longer it takes to onboard new hires or reskill existing agents, the more time you have to wait before you see ROI. You could be hemorrhaging customers while you wait for agents to reach the necessary performance standards. 

AI-powered training platforms can deliver targeted, interactive training sessions. Active learning has been proven to be more effective at driving skills and knowledge acquisition, compared to traditional training methods, enabling call center agents to acquire skills and knowledge in a shorter space of time.

When you use AI training, you can also personalize training experiences according to individual training needs. The platforms dynamically adjust the difficulty level and pace of training exercises to match the learning style of each agent, which makes it far more efficient. 

Train agents anywhere

The shift to remote work brought a lot of benefits for agents’ work-life balance, but also made it a lot harder to carry out effective training. AI training, however, isn’t affected by distance or time zones. AI-powered role play personas are always ready to practice an authentic conversation, no matter what time it is. 

AI-enabled virtual training environments enable call center agents to participate in training sessions remotely from anywhere with an internet connection, eliminating the need for travel expenses and logistical challenges associated with in-person training programs. They also deliver assessments and evaluations in a timely manner, so agents on the other side of the world don’t need to wait for their manager to wake up and send them feedback. 

Ensure consistency at scale

Making sure that every agent in your thousands-strong workforce is using the same messaging, adhering to the same disclaimers, and complying fully with requirements can be extremely challenging. It’s even difficult to know if every manager and trainer is holding agents to the same standards. 

That’s not a problem with AI. No matter how far you scale your teams, you can verify that every agent meets the same levels of product knowledge and soft skills before they begin taking live calls. It’s simple to enforce compliance with legal and industrial regulations for customer-facing conversations. What’s more, every AI trainer is objective, so you’ll know that each agent is being assessed according to the same evaluation metrics. 

Strengthen soft skills

Call center and BPO customers aren’t only looking for fast call resolution and efficient trouble-shooting. They also want to feel that agents understand their needs, care about their concerns, and value their opinion. 

That requires having agents who are expert at soft skills like expressing empathy and active listening, which are far more challenging to impart than technical expertise or product knowledge. The best way to do so is through repeated practice and timely feedback, which is difficult to achieve with the limited time that trainers are available, but much easier with AI. 

AI role play personas will rehearse a conversation again and again without ever losing patience. The algorithm’s instant feedback about tone, pace, and even body language provides actionable advice for agents to improve their skills, and agents can immediately repeat a conversation to turn best practice recommendations into habit. 

Save time for managers

Despite the fear-mongering around AI in general, there are no plans to replace human managers with AI trainers. Instead, AI training can augment manager capabilities by taking over many time-consuming and tedious tasks, generating reports, and delivering timely and accurate evaluations. 

With the help of AI insights, managers can gain a better understanding of each agent’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the overall needs of their team. Freed from the burden of scoring hundreds of recorded conversations, managers have more time to dedicate to those individuals who need extra help and support. 

Reports and information generated by AI training platforms also serve as a useful guide for training enablement and learning and development leadership. It helps them to identify areas for improvement, and develop more effective training programs based on data insights. 

Multiply your training courses

Building up your training programs the traditional way can take a great deal of time, energy, and other resources. This limits the number of different courses BPOs and call centers can offer their people, and can hold them back from rolling out sessions that are adapted to specific clients, industries, or types of interactions. 

However, when you use AI you can produce new courses with your existing resources, in a much shorter space of time. Generative AI makes it easy and quick to produce new training courses, so you can offer courses at every level, adjusted for agents with varying backgrounds and experience, and suitable for each type of situation or industry that you want to cover. 

Second Nature brings more power to your training experiences 

Second Nature’s AI-powered training solution turbo-charges training programs for BPO and call center agents. It’s the only AI training platform that fully simplifies course creation. All that you need to do is upload a slide deck, text document, voice recording, or URL, and apply one of Second Nature’s templates. Within a minute, you’ll have a fully functional AI training session at your fingertips. 

Second Nature brings a range of realistic and relatable role play personas and AI trainers. Each one is always ready to conduct an authentic conversation, delivers timely feedback, and enables personalized, active learning that’s more effective at driving soft skills and product knowledge. 

AI is the secret to efficient training programs

Implementing an AI training platform in your call center or BPO is an excellent and cost-effective way to ramp up the power of your training programs. AI algorithms evaluate agent performance, always-available AI role play personas increase training time, interactive AI experiences improve skills acquisition, and AI analysis drives personalized training. It all adds up to more effective call center and BPO training for lower costs, which translates into happier customers, more sales, and improved revenue.