• Can you name the most common interactions AI escalates to your human agents?
• Is there an established workflow between your training team, QA team, and operations management to keep that curriculum current?
You need those feedback loops to make curriculum changes and keep your new hire training aligned with what is happening on the floor.
A second way to increase learning and save time is to make your training scenario based. For example, instead of just showing new hires how to add an address in your CRM, frame your training with the scenario of a customer calling in to change their address.
Scenario-based training is faster, more meaningful, and has better learner retention, because human agents first learn WHY they need to do something, then HOW to do it. That prepares them to handle actual customer scenarios versus learning facts or processes in a vacuum.
ADD TRAINING FOR VETERAN AGENTS
It is not just new hires that need these advanced skills. Your existing veteran human agents may also need training on:
• Customer service skills.
• Emotional intelligence, empathy, and negotiation skills.
• How to solve more complex problems.
• The same training new hires receive about how to take escalated“ handoffs” from AI and begin their conversations with customers.
The way to look at it is that the unusual, complex, or emotional situations that may have happened once or twice a day may now be happening a half dozen to a dozen times a day. This can increase your existing agents’ stress level.
Have you had an existing agent quit because they feel customer interactions are much harder than they used to be?
They are feeling pressure now from angrier customers and more complicated issues escalated to them by AI. That forces the agent( s) to cope with tougher interactions and more of them. They may have never been trained to do this.
A recent Verint survey found“ 46 % of agents aged 18 – 34 were likely to leave within six months.” To help retain agents instead, provide additional training on how to deal with these escalations, rather than train brand new hires on everything.
Back to“ productivity.” Which is more cost-effective, no, or more additional training?
Consider this: McKinsey and Company research puts the cost of replacing a contact center agent at $ 10,000 to $ 20,000, a figure still widely cited across the industry today.
Bottom line: it is more cost-effective to train existing agents on the skills they need to handle what agentic AI cannot do.
BOTTOM LINE: IT IS MORE COST-EFFECTIVE TO TRAIN EXISTING AGENTS ON THE SKILLS THEY NEED TO HANDLE WHAT AGENTIC AI CANNOT DO.
TRAINING
CHECK THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR TRAINING
For new hires, check with the post-training“ nesting team” to see if they are having to do more work now than they did before to fill in new hire skills gaps.
Also check with your QA team to see if the kinds of interactions they are scoring agents on match what is coming to human agents. The point is that new hire human agents need to know more to handle the escalations that are coming to them.
For both new hires and existing agents, one way to check for rising interaction complexity is to look at average talk time rather than average handle time( AHT).
The reason I mention talk time as opposed to AHT is AI agent assist, automatic note-taking, and faster backend processing could reduce after-call work( ACW). Reduction in ACW can mask an increase in talk time, because AHT may look the same or even shorter, even as your actual talk time is rising.
View increased talk time or increased chat handling time as indicators these escalated interactions are more complex and more emotional now. That means veteran agents and new hires need more training and coaching to handle those issues.
And here is the irony. The better your agentic AI is at containment, the better your human agent ' s emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills will need to be.
Mike Aoki is the President of Reflective Keynotes Inc., a training company that helps contact centers improve their sales and customer experience results. Mike is a frequent contributor to Contact Center Pipeline and a member of their Advisory Board. He also serves on the board of GTACC( Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre Association).
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