Have you been looking for a suitable Learning Management System or LMS for contact centres? If so, you are not alone. In fact, a recent Capterra report showed that 28% of organisations are looking to get started with their LMS within the next year. LMS for contact centres helps solve many challenges and provide tremendous benefits. However, not every LMS is perfect for every Contact Center or a BPO setup. This article will help you navigate through some of the tough questions.

A Learning Management System (LMS), whether you are managing a contact centre or distributed workforce, is essential for enhancing the performance of employees through training. LMS for contact centres has a subtle shift in focus from being merely about training to one geared toward educating employees, emphasising improving their overall knowledge and relationships.

Call centres/contact centres are a fascinating place to work in using technology to power the business. Suppose you are in charge of choosing the technologies available to your agents, consultants, and internal training staff. In that case, you must consider how these decisions will translate into measurable business results. So how can you select the suitable LMS for BPO in your business environment?

Understanding the challenges behind your contact centre

What is the most significant operational and logistical problem confronting the managers of contact centres?

Getting their agents (both in-house and outsourced) trained and ready to fulfil business expectations on time.

In a particular time frame, agents must be taught about specific products and processes. As a result, the training arrangement must be adaptable to handle the following:

• Training programmes for new hires must be upgraded regularly
• Due to seasonal ramp-ups, new recruit training is required (e.g. annual sales)
• Unexpected need for new product training or process and product updates
• Evaluate the Agents on a regular and special basis to ensure that they are well-trained

The situation becomes much more difficult when agents are dispersed throughout several locations or outsourced to diverse partners.

As the organisation’s training needs grow, more trainers are needed to meet the demand. There is also the issue of developing and maintaining training content. Hence, navigating through these learning challenges in your contact centre becomes essential to establishing a seamless growth curve.

Getting the basics right for your LMS for contact centre

Selecting the right LMS or Enterprise Learning Management System can be time-consuming. First and foremost, you need to look at your organisation’s requirements and define the specifications of the LMS you want. It is also crucial to select a vendor with whom you can maintain continuity through multiple years because it is always better to stick with a single vendor to ensure maximum compatibility between both systems hence avoiding disruptions.

Corporate software companies strive to offer Learning Management Systems to businesses and educational institutions. At the same time, non-profit organisations have created free and low-cost systems to help facilitate and spread education throughout the world.

As a result, the number of options has grown, and selecting LMS for your business that fits it well is no easy feat.

A top-notch LMS comes with a big box of benefits for your contact centre

Consider a learning management system (LMS) as a large online environment suited for dynamic and on-demand learning. LMS for BPO, being the engine that drives eLearning, assists contact centres in the following ways:

• Identify training and learning gaps.
• Create, administer, and deliver training and education programmes.
• To fulfil particular training requirements, automate and scale.
• Training efficacy should be tracked, documented, and reported.
• Highly Specific Training Per Employee
• Increased employee engagement
• Minimised employee turnover
• Track Training Progress and Effectiveness
• Improved Customer Satisfaction
• Cost-effective solution to simplified & automated remote learning

You save time by avoiding regular administrative duties by automating your training using an LMS for contact centres. You may link your LMS to your HR system, for example, to automatically add and enrol new employees as they are employed. With the touch of a mouse, you can easily assign courses and learning pathways to groups or individual users. You may also send out reminders to your employees to remind them that it’s time to learn.

Tackling the learning challenges with an efficient LMS for BPO

Today, as an industry, we face the most critical challenges for contact centres, especially in terms of transparency and trust. Thinking about the future and how to overcome today’s challenges, good call centres already are embracing additive technologies such as E-learning to enable better performance. With technologies having a great role in employee training today, it’s crucial to understand why E-learning is being used and its benefits for contact centre employees.

Well developed e-learning program can improve the performance of employees in contact centres dramatically. Challenges in contact centres are very different from those in regular organisations as many aspects need to be considered, such as organisational culture, customer service, flexible working hours etc.

From the agent’s standpoint, this entails receiving interactive learning information that they must complete independently. Some evaluations frequently accompany it.

It involves having the self-learning information for the required subjects available and sending it to the correct set of agents at the right time, according to the training team. Because everything is managed through an LMS for contact centres, it’s simple to keep track of training completion and agent performance.

Another issue that eLearning helps to deal with is training agents at a large scale. For online learning, the number of learners (agents) has no bearing. As a result, eLearning is the ideal remedy for efficiently fulfilling unpredictable training demands. Because the quantity of instructor-led training decreases, training teams can maintain a consistent number of trainers while still meeting training expectations.

Now, let us understand how we can strategically select the best LMS solution for your contact centre that helps you reach your business goals in less time with efficient planning.

Defining your goal behind adopting an LMS for contact centre

A Learning Management System is a vital piece of any Contact centre. It will help agents navigate the learning process most efficiently and effectively possible. But choosing the right LMS for your contact centre can be difficult. There are very few predefined standards, which means whichever solution you choose will have to fit your required individual needs as well as your budget.

You must ensure that you can answer the following questions to gauge your goal to purchase an LMS for your contact centre:

• What are the learning objectives of employees/learners who will use the LMS?
• What will be taught in terms of process content?
• What method will you use to distribute the eLearning content?
• What is the total number of users?
• How much time do you have to achieve the learning completion?
• Will you host the software yourself, or will you hire someone else to do so?

Setting the budget limits for your transformational purchase

Customer service agents are the face-to-face representatives of any business. These agents often find themselves in frustrating situations and at the brunt of customer complaints. An effective LMS for contact centres can help streamline business challenges. But how do you pick the one that suits your needs without burning a hole in your pocket?

You must evaluate the number of people who will use your LMS while setting a specific budget for the programme. In other words, as the number of users grows, so does the cost. Thus it’s critical to prepare ahead of time and calculate the number of users before acquiring any LMS for BPO.

If you choose to utilise free LMS software (open source), take in mind the cost of hosting the programme, the cost of training, and if you will buy a third-party support solution for it or handle all of its problems on your own (in case you have an excellent technical team). One way to control the cost of the LMS for BPOs while maintaining an equilibrium with your CFO is to link it to the average salary of the staff member. For example, if you agree on a, say 0.075 – 0.15% of the average salary towards the online learning costs then you do not have to revisit it repeatedly.

Determining the LMS features for your specific needs

Although the LMS for BPOs ranges from one provider to the next, they always share a few key features that must be included in every remote learning system. But what if your business needs a particular feature? For example, your organisation may want the ability to access the system via cell phones or mobile devices, so verify if the system is suitable.

To listen to lectures, certain firms may demand the presence of an online course in the system. Others are unconcerned since all lessons will be delivered via instructional videos that will be uploaded to the system and used by the trainer wherever they desire. So, while you’re preparing, be sure you know exactly what you want from the system.

Few of the most important aspects to look for in a provider for your LMS for contact centre is the ability to:

• You may manage your courses without any technological knowledge.
• Exams and questionnaires are used to assess the learners’ knowledge.
• Integrate with other contact centre software (such as an HRMS or an enterprise SSO) to automate and scale training.
• Encourage social learning and discourse.
• Gamification may be used to engage students.
• Actionable reports can provide you with valuable information.
• Automated processes can help you streamline your training.
• Provide a combination of instructor-led and self-paced training.
• Automatically certify successful students.
• Create portals to instruct numerous audiences simultaneously.
• Learner Feedback: You need to know what learners truly think about the quality of courses in your LMS to know if it’s really working. Your LMS for BPO should provide a method for students to provide detailed feedback on their course experience and instructors via surveys.
• Mobile-Friendly: The finest learning management systems provide you with the flexibility to train at any time and from any location. Look for a system that is mobile-friendly and includes an app for on-the-go learning. It should work flawlessly on every platform, including desktops, mobile phones, and tablets.
• Company branding: You want your training to represent your company when you offer it. Consider a system that you can customise with your logo, colours, photos, and custom URLs, among other things. The goal is to be able to create a setting that your audience instantly knows.
• If you have a worldwide call centre, provide training in the user’s preferred language: French, German, English, Spanish, and so on.

Does your customer support team have the required skills to adapt an LMS?

Are you a CEO, sales leader or COO of a company that has a customer support team? Do you know if your customer support team has the required skills to adapt an LMS for BPO? If you have an existing customer support team or are currently building one, we recommend getting in touch with the training and development team. This is because these professionals can provide you with information on what does and doesn’t work when it comes to employee training.

You may like a training management system on the internet and wish to purchase it, but have you considered whether it is appropriate for your team? Is it simple to operate, or does it need training? Will it cover all of your company’s requirements or only a portion of them?

88% of customer support agents say they/their teams are highly involved in training staff to use the LMS. And yet, leading eLearning platform providers report a low number of customers completing training. Making a wise choice to find the perfect LMS solution for your employees is an essential aspect of incorporating the learning module into your contact centre.

Get answers to critical business questions before making a purchase

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a training management portal that provides a company’s support team with the necessary training and resources to provide customers with humane and efficient support. However, it is important to ensure that you choose an LMS for contact centres that answers some of the most critical business questions for your contact centre. Are you unsure about the additional points to look for in an LMS for contact centres? No more worries, we’re here to help simplify your requirements.

Adaptability is the way to go in fast-pacing contact centre environments

Is the software flexible enough to meet the needs of the business? Is it simple to change the settings to accommodate a higher number? Is it intended for a specific number of users? Check out how steady it is while dealing with big groups of people. Is the software crashing or working properly?

Track your team’s learning process for complete visibility into your transformational change

The objective of an LMS for contact centres is to track learners’ progress during the learning process. As a result, it must be able to provide reports and data that may assist you in determining if the learning process is going well or whether there is a problem with the system.

Can your new LMS be integrated with your existing system?

If you already have a system in place, make sure the new software works seamlessly with it. To find out, speak with your present company’s Learning and Development specialists about the hardware capabilities and software in use. Also, be aware of the issues they are experiencing with the existing system so that the new system can address them.

Cross-check your choice with previous buyers for a more transparent outlook

If you decide to purchase one of the systems on the market, you should speak with a current user to learn about all of the benefits and drawbacks. Getting feedback from a firm that uses the product regularly is considerably more essential than listening to salespeople.

Get your after-sales service and maintenance right

You should verify the technical support or after-sales service if you have purchased software. Will the assistance be available 24 hours a day, or only at specific times? Will you be able to use the programme for free during a trial period, or will you have to purchase the complete version? Will, your users, be trained on the application, or will they merely be given a handbook with no further instructions?

If you select a non-commercial LMS for contact centre, be sure the programme is stable. Everyone in your organisation is familiar with it and can address any present or future problems.

Finally, you should be aware that no software is superior to another; each has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. As a result, you must select software that is appropriate for your company’s goals and budget. It needs careful consideration to select the finest.

Put an end to the learning bottlenecks at your contact centre.

We can undoubtedly say that investing in a high-quality call centre learning management solution may make a big difference in your bottom line. It will not only help you enhance productivity, but it will also help you improve client happiness, lower agent turnover, and generate more revenues. The trick is to select a cutting-edge LMS for contact centres that is designed particularly to suit their needs.

Learning is the backbone to improving employee productivity. New hires will find their first day very tough in a contact centre as they may not have prior experience or knowledge of your product or service. Your Learning Management System (LMS) should ease this transition by providing them with the information they need to do a good job for you from the start.

An effective LMS for your contact centre is crucial. It plays a critical role in the overall success of your operation. It helps you develop and support top agents, improve all-around communications, offer your employees more relevant and dynamic training, reinforce knowledge sharing, and streamline operations in the centre. In fact, it is such an imperative business tool that when a contact centre invests in it, there are huge benefits to reap.

If you wish to explore an effective and efficient LMS for your contact centre that helps you navigate the learning challenges seamlessly, drop a line to the learning experts at PlayAblo. We can assist you in finding your perfect LMS match that fits your specific organisation needs.