By Stephanie Jones
If you’ve made a management career for yourself in a high-turnover industry, you’ve probably found yourself frustrated about training. After all, training new employees is expensive and time-consuming. And if they’re just planning to quit soon, why even bother?
It’s important to note that high-quality employee training is essential, no matter what your turnover rate looks like. The problem is wasting great training materials on employees who are often gone before their one-year anniversary.
Our call center is based in a town with several colleges, so we know a few things about high turnover. Here are some of the ways we make our employee courses great and disseminate as much information as possible with efficiency.
Think Beyond Your Main Objectives
How does the topic apply to your employees in the real world? What about your customers? Take time to consider all angles of the story you’re trying to tell.
Consider what happens when someone doesn’t get it right. If you only see training from your perspective—which is the perspective of someone who already knows the answers—then you might miss what happens when someone doesn’t get it. Look at the language you’re using to present the material and the questions you ask.
When you consider the whole picture while creating a course, you become ultra-efficient. You cover more material faster. You spend less time adding content or editing quizzes.
Share Relevant Information Where Employees Will Actually Read It
Things can change quickly. Expecting trainees to always check into a learning management system (LMS) to see what’s going on isn’t practical. You must meet them where they communicate.
We make use of the collaboration hub, such as Slack, to share important updates, communicate with employees about their courses, and impart information about current training initiatives. It’s a quick and easy touchstone for our training team.
Whether it’s sharing a video about how much tone can change a conversation to a scripting change to fielding feedback on our courses, our training team can deliver information instantly. No more sending emails and hoping trainees will see and read them.
Write Your Training for Human Beings
It once was common practice for learning and development and HR departments to create ultra-polished and highly technical courses and manuals. Many large organizations still do despite the changes in modern communication.
Your employees don’t have the attention span or energy to take on a thick book of dense material. And if they do, how much are they learning from it?
Certain industries will always have a need for technical training materials, but not all of us work for engineering companies. It’s time to write from a place of empathy and understanding. It’s time to write with voice and character.
As an instructional designer, one of my biggest goals was to rework our training materials so they were easy and enjoyable to read. I wanted our courses to have a blog-post feeling to them. This meant shorter paragraphs, visual aids, and interactive elements. I use bulleted lists, subheadings to draw out main points, and gifs and emojis to illustrate and break up the content.
Condensed your most important material into relatable language. Then you can disseminate the information, and have it applied fast. This is a priceless advantage in the call center industry.
Training doesn’t have to be dense or dull. Taking dense or dull information and turning it into something anyone can easily read (without dread) should always be the goal.
Use Tools That Make Course Design and Organization Easy
The ability to create effective training courses with expediency is key in an industry with a high turnover rate. We have a finite amount of time to teach our agents. That’s why it’s so important that we create courses in as little time as possible.
We use Rise by Articulate360 to author courses that are beautiful and easy to use; it doesn’t seem possible that we made them with a drag-and-drop tool. We organize and assign our courses with Litmos, a cloud-based learning management system.
Sometimes we need animated videos to drive a point home, and Powtoon makes video creation simple—no editing or design skills are necessary. What about visual aids? Instead of outsourcing design work, Canva helps us make graphics in a matter of minutes.
There are many cloud-based resources to help streamline the training process. Using a combination of the top tools will help you get your training materials to your trainees much faster.
Creating Great Employee Training Is Possible
Have you ever thought, I feel like I’m running on a hamster wheel? How do we expect anyone to learn anything when the turnover rate is so high?
If so, you’re not alone.
Building quality training in a high-turnover industry can feel like a struggle. Without modern tools and a willingness to expand your thinking on training, you’ll only move as fast as you do now. Instead, use these ideas and tools to produce great employee training materials for the high-turnover call center industry.
Stephanie Jones is the instructional designer for PATLive, a US-based call center, where she imbues her passion for great customer service into building better employee training. She has a background in journalism and has written many posts for the PATLive blog.