Call Centre Training for Sales and Management

An introduction to Call Centre Training for Sales and Management.

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What are our Call Centre Sales Training Courses About?

Let’s look briefly at the position call centres play in business.

In the 1980s the word ‘centre’ and the US version ‘center’ became very popular. Every business wanted to proclaim they had a place that was a centre of expertise or at least a hub a customer could rely on. Businesses grew to having a large number of these centres, which increasingly became customer service-based operations using the phone rather than buildings and other forms of retail premises for face-to-face sales and service. The cost of serving the customer or the cost of sale went down for the brand and the aim was for experience to be as good for the customer as if it were in person. These multiple centres meant the word centre no longer had any geographical context, rather a series of customer serving places to be there for the customer, at the centre of what they needed.

In the 1990’s outsourcing became increasingly popular and large numbers of UK businesses, in particular banks, financial services, IT and software providers outsourced their sales and service operations to other countries including India and the Philippines. It is estimated by JJL research that in India alone today there are 1.1 million people employed in BPOs -Business Process Outsourcing. Today’s growth markets include Malaysia, China and Vietnam.
As of October 2020 it was estimated that 4% of the UKs workforce work in call centres or contact centres as is now often the preferred term. So, its place in business, revenue growth and the retention of customers is very significant.

There are an increasing number of ways to communicate with customers, using the phone, web chat and messaging, video conferencing, with AI and Bots increasingly doing parts of the communication or even all of it, if possible.

Our Call Centre Training

We recommend developing the entire team, the entire estate. This means that the Head of the Contact Centre and their Sales Managers is often the place to start. If a site has a thousand people this might have a Head with two deputies and 5 Sales Managers.

The work with this level of management is to help them to change the way they lead, coach and inspire their managers who in turn support and manage smaller teams, often between 8 and 20 people.

We engage them in the programme that takes a modular approach that begins with helping them to consider exactly where the business is now, what they are focussing on and what the culture encourages them to do. To get more of an idea of the topics they become developed in, see List of Call Centre Training Courses. In addition, we recommend that all of these managers receive one to one coaching, for more details on coaching see Contact Centre Coaching.

We also have a range of programmes for Team Leaders, again a modular approach and at this level, a mix of group and 1-1 coaching works well in helping them set and achieve personal and team goals. See List of Call Centre Training Courses.

Contact Centre Sales and Service Training

Your advisors need a robust and contemporary conversational model, so whichever channel they are communicating to customers with, they have something that is inspiring to use and effective in changing performance and results.

Our conversational structures, principles and framework are being used by over 21,000 managers, sales and service people in many sectors all over the World. Our partnerships have delivered and continue to bring a significant return for many leading and ambitious brands.

The challenge for many businesses is they are trying to work with outdated direct selling techniques. Or when it comes to customer service, transactional service that lacks any understanding of both the advisors and customers emotions. They don’t find out enough about the customer, or the influencers of the buying decision and they either keep asking closed questions to get the right data for the software system, or they push a certain product or service, using tenuous links that are of little or no relevance to the customer’s needs or wants.

Our models typically follow 5 key Principles and the model we’ll develop for you usually has a bespoke name linked to what you do, with five letters, an acrostic, rather than an acronym.

We have tailored both our Sales and Customer Service Training to work a range of products and services and we have done this work in many different countries and cultures.
We have worked in twenty-one countries including the UK, Europe, India and the US. In fact, our most popular programme, the 5 Principles of Sales through Service, has consistently delivered improved sales conversion rates for organisations in five different states in the US, India and the Philippines.

We will develop a model for your contact centre teams that enables every agent, advisor, salesperson, consultant or customer service professional to take any tentative enquiry, turn them into a new customer, or retain, grow and manage the expectations of an existing customer.

List of Our Call Centre Training Courses for Managers.

Managing People

Leadership as a principle. What type of leader you are and who can you become? Managers explore their current default and build a plan on how to adapt and grow as they shape the new culture of delivering exceptional customer experience.

The Art of Delegation.

This is a great way to build the managers of tomorrow and develop the right aspiring assistant managers or to recognise and develop management talent.

Meeting strategies and Managing Remotely versus Managing on site.

The best managers can create motivational meetings and create a culture of team and individual contributions. To become a transformational manager you must look outside, learn and take inspiration from a variety of sources so you can build on your knowledge in addition to experience.

Coaching and Disloyal Bonding: Targets vs. capabilities.

Managing Individual Performance. Bonding with customers against your brand even in the smallest way tells customers that you have a problem with the brand you represent. It is learnt behaviour and comes from a false impression it will bond you to the customer and deliver revenue. This module equips managers to move to removing this from your culture.

DRIVES Collaboration workshop

Discretion, Roles, Integrity, Vision, Environment. Creating a Collaborative Culture. We explore the different dynamics of collaboration of high performing teams and then individual teams choose which drivers will drive change and they create strategies to achieve new goals.

Tough Coaching: Difficult Conversations

The REAL Model used to manage tougher discussions.
When is it the right time for someone to ‘go on a PDP’?. By raising the confidence and communication ability of managers they won’t put off until tomorrow what they could do today.

Managing Call Centre Work and Processes

Long Term Sales Strategy – Goal Setting

Having a clean slate each morning to improve upon yesterday is one thing, intensive daily micro-management is another less productive route. To train managers in how to translate company-wide goals into the whole contact centre estate is a positive way to help managers develop longer term goals and objectives for everyone. Financial targets are only one part of the picture in a manager’s role in creating well rounded individuals who enjoy having colleagues who encourage and support them.

Mapping workflow

And the managers role in improving systems and communication. We often follow the same processes we have inherited without questioning them, when you can refine them or create far better routes to achieve desired outcomes. This exercise educates managers in how to scrutinise accepted methods and make them slicker, and more customer focused.

Time Management

Principles and Ideas. New ways to consider our time, and how we use it.
At the end of the 1980s Stephen Covey produced his famous time quadrant and helped millions of executives understand the difference between Urgent and Important activities. His work and other contemporary time-based ideas have yet to reach every workplace and this workshop will help managers to rethink time, focus and energy. This workshop culminates in the creation of a new product or service, that different teams develop using different time-based principles. You then draw conclusions on what prioritisation and effective time management really means.

Managers Presenting Strategy and Ideas to their Teams.

Presenting

What makes people listen? Examples of Great Presenters and what preparation looks like.

We give people the CADA structure for presenting. Cada in Spanish means each or every and this ensures every presentation they give, either to colleagues or customers at an event has been prepared and passes the test of Credibility, Advantages of Listening, Details to the power of 3 and the Actions the audience must take. So far Reality has trained over 2,500 executives in this powerful method.

Train the Coach

All managers are trained in an effective performance coaching model that helps them to coach regularly and embed the new principles with their team. We help them make the big move from coaching by numbers, ‘coaching the call’, to coaching the person.

Accredited and trained, a number of Reality Training's team are Executive Coaching Practitioners. Studying with the Academy of Executive Coaches has given them expertise in the most effective coaching techniques and practices. We have a team of high-level coaches who are also able to become your additional support. Each year we typically coach between 150 and 300 managers and train twice that number in how to coach.

Who are our Call Centre Training Courses for?

What’s our method?

Our method is to train people in a series of principles. We give people examples of how the principles work in other organisations and throughout the sessions people are creating or translating ideas into new language and approaches that will work for them. They then test the language, and ideas with exercises, and then in their very next communication with customers.

The training is interactive, upbeat, challenging and fun.

The result being the team unite over an approach that resonates with their personalities and your strategy and they are inspired to get to work.

Embedding

The model and understanding it is just the first part of the training. We then move to the application and the embedding of the training. We do this work in a variety of ways and partner with you so the methods you choose are the right ones for your people and culture.

Our embedding programme includes these methods:

Training Films

We have been making training films with the same specialist partner for twelve years and sixteen clients use our work to train, embed and induct people in exactly the right way to have conversations and manage people. We work with a number of actors who are our trainers, and we have an even bigger group of actors, including many well-known faces who appear in our training films which are amusing, memorable, and often provide for many, the breakthroughs they need by way of defining examples of how the skills can be used to achieve powerful internal and customer engagement.

Role Play clinics

live or virtually, testing the conversational model with different motives and customer types.

Site Visits

We attend in person or virtually and run a trouble shooting session or help managers adapt to meet new or topical demands.

Podcasts

This is becoming a fast-growing popular resource. Having launched our own Podcast, Bob and Jeremy’s Conflab during the first lockdown in 2020 we now offer clients bespoke podcasts. Whether sales, service or management we make focussed topic-based episodes where we discuss and bring alive the challenge versus the opportunity and make clear what the solution is.

Webinars

These are a presentation of a topic or a whole module where we develop visual support, and you have your trainer bringing the topic to life. They can be watched on demand and work particularly well when we make short highly specific webinars that address a common challenge.

The Benefits of Our Call Centre Training

The world is changing, and more call centres are stagnating. They are ripe for re-invention. As retail and other customer serving channels become harder to deliver for brands, the call centre will continue to be the go-to method for customers to reach out with their enquiries as well as their challenges. The brands that make this communication smooth and uplifting will win a larger market share of the customers in the sectors in which they operate.

How to Apply for Our Call Centre Training Courses

Contact Us 

Just get in touch by clicking here and telling us what your initial thoughts are as to the position that you're in and where you would like to begin, we can then set up a time to talk to you where will ask you questions, so we get a strong brief and move to making you a proposal.

 

How long does call centre training take?

We have programmes and projects that often run from between one and three years. This depends on the size and scale. We also have had very small projects with small and ambitious contact centre teams, that means we might work with you for as little as three to six months.

What is call centre agent training?

This is the very specific work of giving the agent the language, sales and service skills to understand what the customer wants, whether a prospect or a current customer. We develop their skills by giving them a sales or customer service model. 

Contact Centre Sales and Service Training

What’s the difference between a call centre and contact centre?

Nothing, just language. Years ago, we only had the phone, so we called them ‘call’ centres. Now many are equipped to receive web chat enquiries or web conferencing ‘contact’ from customers. The first call centres where the major telephone operators in the 1960s. Then as freephone numbers were invented other brands worked with call centres or created their own to take in bound calls from customers responding to their advertising. This began to grow hugely in the 80s, so much so that in the early 90s, laws came into place which made it harder for outbound calling to take place.
Then as the dot com boom happened, we all started to get lots of emails instead, I still do you cry!

Today’s contact centre is one that should be able to provide a professional omni channel experience.

For more information on these or any of our Training Courses, please contact us below.

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