Contact centres fail to provide adequate selling skills to agents

The Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report highlights a concerning training gap in selling skills at a time when many businesses are attempting to transform their call centres from "cost centres" into "profit centres".

The survey also revealed that a staggering 77% of businesses do not measure the cost of training against the overall benefit to their contact centre. Given this lack of measurement, it is not surprising that contact centres in some regions have succumbed to financial pressures and reduced the amount of agent coaching time. Europe dedicates half the amount of coaching (4.5 hours) per agent per month than the US (9.2 hours), which may contribute to the US's lower attrition rate.

Contact centres hit by cost containment measures are turning to new training methods such as e-learning to supplement their training programmes. The survey shows that the number of contact centres (43%) using e-learning has doubled since 2001, while both classroom learning and external training courses have been scaled back.

Written communication skills are becoming more important, with more than half (55%) of contact centres citing them as an essential agent skill compared to only one in five (21%) in 1999. Over a quarter (27%) of businesses state they experience problems in recruiting agents with adequate written skills. The largest gap in skills is unsurprisingly "industry-specific" knowledge as the contact centre industry's image and low remuneration fails to attract agents with commercial experience.

Ian Barlett, group contact centre training manager of Merchants, commented: "Training is one area that has been hit harder than most by companies' wider budget restraints. Businesses must begin the journey of measuring training against benefits realised. Unless this process is commenced and a link can be demonstrated between agent development and performance improvements, the pressure to cut costs in this area will continue unabated. The long-term damage and knock-on effect of training cuts will be the attrition of employees and a loss of intellectual property and reputation in the marketplace."

First published in the UK in 1996 by Merchants, European contact centre specialists and a subsidiary of Dimension Data, this year's edition is the sixth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from over 200 contact centres in 19 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of benchmarks with which to measure their operations against, including contact centre staff salary levels, performance statistics, technology developments, CRM trends and training needs.