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Call centers are under pressure to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Success depends on effective training, but traditional approaches often fall short. This article explains how AI-powered sales and customer support training overcomes the five most common mistakes made by call center agents and enables operational excellence.
The five most common call center customer support agent issues:
Call center customer support agents and sales reps are expected to deliver high sales volumes and call resolution rates, in increasingly stressful circumstances. Customer patience levels are dropping and expectations are rising, so it’s not surprising that mistakes and missteps can occur.
High churn rates among agents and increasingly complex queries and products can result in frequent errors, which translate into dropped calls, missed deals, and rising customer frustration. In theory, training should prevent these errors from occurring, but that’s not always the case. Errors still occur all too often, harming your KPIs and your reputation.
The awkward truth is that call center training is not always effective. A shortage of managers and experienced coaches means that agents can’t get the role play practice time needed to master skills and knowledge, and feedback reaches them too late to be truly useful.
What’s more, not every manager knows how to train others, and reps and agents who need the most support often go overlooked. The shift to remote work only made remote training less effective, leaving agents with no one to ask for advice in the moment.
“Onboarding is all about creating that safe space for people to make mistakes in that safe environment, as opposed to having that disaster happen for them. Our grads preferred to practice with [Second Nature’s] AI automation, because it was less pressured, and then they’re ready to go out and handle objections from the customer.” – Susan Greenberg, Global Presales Readiness Lead
Fortunately, AI-powered training can address many of these issues, improve call center agent performance, and enhance customer experience. Here are the five most frequent issues that arise in call centers, and the ways that AI customer service training can help prevent or drastically reduce them.
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Many customer support and sales conversations go south because of poor soft skills, especially around communication. Agents who struggle to adequately describe the value proposition of a solution, explain the cause of a glitch, or simplify complex instructions can leave customers frustrated, irritated, and inclined to churn.
AI training allows agents to rehearse every scenario with any type of customer, so they can polish their soft skills. AI coaches give instant feedback about wording, tone, and even body language, spotting subtleties of expression that human managers and trainers may overlook.
“Sometimes the manager feedback is not that great because some managers just aren’t great at giving feedback. But the tool really kind of formalizes it into a way you can really understand where you need to get better really instantly.” Michael Martin, Senior Director of Sales Enablement, Calix
Practicing challenging conversations in a safe environment gives agents more confidence once they move onto live calls. It also removes the stress and anxiety that comes with human-led training, freeing agents to try different possibilities and learn through trial and error.
Lack of soft skills can result in a perceived lack of empathy. Customers are looking for understanding as well as answers, but sometimes, agents come across as indifferent and uncaring. This can leave customers feeling ignored, even when the agent successfully resolves their problem or answers their questions.
Soft skills like active listening and expressing concern are tough to teach in a classroom setting or through educational videos. But AI training using smart role play personas allows call center agents to practice active listening until they succeed, without running out of patience or focus. Call center agents learn how to communicate compassion, while customers receive the caring support that they were looking for.
Call centers and BPOs for industries like healthcare, insurance, and finance have to adhere to specific protocols and/or industrial or legal regulations when talking with customers. Companies in other verticals might also require agents to follow certain policies to ensure consistent service delivery.
“Compliance is really of the utmost importance in the pharmaceutical and medical device space. […] we really need anybody from our organization who is customer-facing to be really buttoned up on that. And that’s one one of the great things that Second Nature has helped us with.” Elaine Jones, Director of Internal Professional Education, Pacira BioSciences
However, these policies can be long, complicated, and hard to remember. Traditional training doesn’t always give agents enough time to practice for them to become fully familiar with the “right” way to conduct a conversation. AI training allows agents to practice as many times as they need to, with feedback to correct mistakes before they become a habit.
If your agents aren’t thoroughly familiar with the products or services they are supporting, they are unlikely to give customers a positive experience. This is especially common in industries with complex packages, like insurance or telecommunications, because passive learning isn’t very effective at driving memory retention. Students forget as much as 50% of new information within 24 hours, and 90% within a week.
Active learning using AI-powered conversations stimulates more areas of the brain, boosting memory retention and ensuring that your agents are fully conversant with your products, services, and solutions. Since the AI role play partner is available 24/7, agents can refresh their knowledge whenever it’s convenient and as often as they like.
Call center and BPO agents have to deal with customers who can be angry and unreasonable, often under time pressure. The stress can result in agents reacting inappropriately to customers. This could take the form of expressing impatience or irritation, or involve overpromising something that the company can’t possibly deliver.
“Working with Second Nature gives you confidence. It doesn’t matter what the person on the other end of the line says in a live call, you know you can respond because you’ve gone over it time and time and time again.“- Jay Fortuna, VP of Learning and Organizational Development, GoHealth
Training using AI simulations gives agents the opportunity to encounter every kind of challenging situation and rehearse the best ways to handle it, all in a safe environment that gives them tips for how to do better. When they enter that scenario in a real life call, they’ll be better able to remain calm and already have an effective response at their fingertips.
Discover what AI-powered training for call centers can do for your teams
With the help of AI training for call center and BPO agents, they can acquire all the skills, knowledge, and appropriate responses that they need to deal successfully with every kind of conversation.
“AI training allows businesses to boost customer service while controlling costs. Agents achieve full proficiency faster, leading to higher customer satisfaction. The [AI] ecosystem enhances key performance metrics like first call resolution, handle time, and NPS.” Pj Singh, Chief Digital Officer, iQor
When they feel more confident about their ability to handle different types of interactions, their performance will improve, and so will your customer satisfaction scores and other KPIs.
Book a personalized demo to see how you can strengthen training for call centers and BPOs with Second Nature.
Can an AI-powered training solution give real-time improvement tips for call center conversations?
Yes. Second Nature’s AI-powered training platform uses role play avatars who give the user instant feedback and suggestions for improvements. Call center agents receive real-time guidance on how to improve customer conversations.
Which AI-powered training solution is best for call centers?
Second Nature’s AI-powered training role play solution is ideal for call centers. It gives call center agents and reps a safe space to practice challenging conversations, delivers real-time feedback to correct mistakes, and is available 24/7 so that agents and reps can practice as often as they like.
Is there an AI training solution that can scale for a call center with thousands of agents?
Yes, Second Nature’s AI-powered training solution is built on robust infrastructure, so it can scale easily for large call centers that have thousands of agents.
How can I use AI-powered training to ensure compliance among call center agents that serve regulated industries?
Enable call center agents to practice support and sales conversations with Second Nature’s knowledgeable, realistic AI-powered role play avatars. Agents and reps receive real-time feedback when they fall short of compliance requirements, and can practice repeatedly until it becomes natural for them to use compliant phrasing.
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