How Technology & Customer Experience Have Changed the Employee Learning Landscape

Call Center Weekly Featured Article

Cloud-based contact center platforms, big data analytics, omni-channel operations, and artificial intelligence applications have all contributed to a prodigious evolution in how we engage and manage customer journeys. These advances also helped drive customers' expectations for more responsive, informed, and accessible services, and service representatives.   

Contact centers have worked hard to keep up with the pace of change in infrastructure, platforms, processes, and consumer demands, and frontline service representatives have been working hard too - but rigid adherence requirements and continuous task repetition combined with an increasing quantity of systems and screens to navigate, multiple communication channels to respond to and 'universal' skill-sets to apply, have made a routinely daunting endeavor all the more challenging, even for the most motivated of people. 

Associates working in these data-driven, tech-laden, experience-demanding contact center environments need resources that both engage, and add immediate value to their work. Josh Bersin described it perfectly last year in a CLO article - "The way people want to learn today can be described in one word: fast. We want entertaining videos that make a point quickly; and we want systems that let us find and consume content with the click of a button."  That's the essence of digital learning and is it's the new normal for employees' knowledge needs. 

Microlearning has become a prominent purveyor of digital learning - sporting short pieces of content (from a few to 5 minutes), often designed as entertaining videos with audio and animation, in some cases targeted to a specific bit of knowledge or single skill, and capable of being powered by platforms that curate users' history.

In his digital learning article earlier this year, Josh Bersin said of microlearning, "We can now produce content that immediately teaches what we need to know, that inserts itself at the time of need, and is so interesting that we remember it after only a few minutes." 

Two decades ago I heard Zig Ziglar say at a seminar, "Your input determines your output". To get better engagement and performance outputs, despite all the increased complexities, we need to give our employees different inputs - make it easy for them to effortlessly build knowledge and skills as part of their normal workflow, and empower them to take part in their own self-learning journeys.  It’s a worthy investment when we remind ourselves that in delivering Customer Experience, we really do get what we give.