Onboarding Call Center Agents: World Travel Holdings' 4 Tickets to Engagement, Productivity

When it comes to customer service, the best response to fear is confrontation.

Instead of cowering away from the threat of unpredictable, unfiltered customer dialogue on social media, successful organizations embrace digital networks as opportunities to overcome negative sentiment and better engage customers.

Instead of worrying about agents acting against corporate interests on the phone, successful organizations view agent empowerment as their best means of developing trust, increasing engagement and aligning activity with key business objectives.

Color me unimpressed, therefore, when businesses skimp on training, coaching and onboarding activities due to fear of agent turnover.

Instead of worrying that such practices will be wasted on individuals who intend to swiftly exit the business, organizations must appreciate agent engagement investments as a means of combating attrition. When a business demonstrates its investment in its talent, its talent will reciprocate with investment in the business. Agent productivity will improve, satisfaction will grow and loyalty will prevail.

A firm believer of the notion that agent satisfaction leads to agent longevity and, more importantly, customer satisfaction, World Travel Holdings takes its onboarding program very seriously. An opportunity not only to build agent skill but cultivate passion in the business, its objectives and its commitment to the customer, the onboarding program is what assures WTH's "love your job" mantra rings true.

At Call Center IQ’s Future Call Center Summit in Orlando, Florida, World Travel Holdings shared the four tenets of its onboarding program.

Blending Learning

While developing basic skills in the physical classroom, WTH supplements the onboarding process with interactive, online, asynchronous opportunities. The strategy, which fosters independent and collaborative learning, incorporates agents into the team without sacrificing attention on their personal passions and bottlenecks.

By easing formality in the classroom environment and providing online guides and facilitators in the independent, digital environment (which receives ample, dedicated resources), WTH overcomes the criticisms commonly levied against blended learning.

Formalized Training & Support Team

If training is a focus rather than a necessary evil, it requires a dedicated team that sees it as a pivotal objective rather than a nuisance.

A fixture of the WTH onboarding process, that team offers agents a dedicated resource for gaining knowledge, cultivating skills and improving performance.

It signals that the business wants agents to be as strong as possible rather than merely good enough. It emphasizes the extent to which they are valued as integral parts of the business rather than as faceless numbers responsible for competently performing tasks.

Is that not the essence of onboarding?

Guest Speakers

Aware that its agent pool is diverse, WTH naturally works to incorporate diverse messaging into its training.

Guest speakers help spotlight that diversity.

Thanks to their diverse messaging, diverse skillsets, diverse experiences and diverse successes, the speakers prove that WTH is not looking to reduce its agents to a single, neutered prototype.

In the short term, it wants to work with agents to amplify their strengths and silence their weaknesses. In the long term, it wants to establish a career trajectory that fits who the agent is instead of one that tells him who he has to be.

Selling Fun

Effective customer management leaders do not simply train agents on culture. They also train agents in the culture.

Certain its agents will be "selling fun" to customers, trainers must do the same during the onboarding process. If their messages and lessons have any prayer of resonating with agents, coaches must embody the culture they are attempting to create. They must not only sell agents on the value of selling fun but represent the fun that is evidently central to the business.

If agents experience a great corporate culture, they will successfully convey that culture to existing and potential customers.