Transitioning To Productions

"After your training, you will be exposed to the real environment of taking in live calls from customers. But of course, you will be moved to productions the way a momma bird teaches her little birds how to fly."

You will be assigned to a new team leader, usually called as transition team leader, who will guide you as you go through shifts of taking calls, mentoring, and additional coaching in 20 days. Your transition team leader will be the one representing you in front of operation managers, clients, and other production stakeholders. Your team leader will answer to the stakeholders for any escalation or even misdeeds that you may commit during your transition period.

Since a team leader will not be able to accommodate all the coaching and escalations that your class may get, you will have mentors, tenured agents from productions, who will be facilitating your daily cluster coaching and answer your questions before, during, and after a call. A mentor usually handles at most four agents to effectively and efficiently coach each of you if ever your cluster will have a lot of escalations in a day.

Also, support teams like quality assurance evaluators, communication coaches, and sales coaches will be there to polish your communication lapses, call-handling and process compliance, and sales pitch strategies.

Quality assurance evaluators are responsible for grading your product know-how and call-handling and process compliance. You will have at least one evaluation per day during your transition period. Most of the time, QAs are after process compliance, whether you give the correct sales disclosures, inform your customers with the correct product or service details, give your callers with the right pricing, and other product or service-related information.

From someone who got into the productions because of perfect QA evaluations, I can say that the only way to get high evaluations is to do whatever you learned from your training and execute the feedback of the evaluators properly. In short, do whatever they say. The transition period is not the time for you to do whatever you want that's against the process guidelines if you want to get into productions.

Communication coaches or just comm coaches are the ones who will help you polish your grammar lapses, how you communicate to your customers, and how you think while conversing with them. From what I saw during one of the transitions that I had before, comm coaches will never get tired of helping you polish your communication lapses unless you don’t want to help yourself. Most of the times, you will have at least one session with a coach in a week but if they see that you need more, you can get at most three sessions per week. Comm coaches love an agent with a neutral accent in using English. This is because it is so much easier to speak with someone without an accent.

Sales coaches are the people who will help you improve your sales pitch. Most sales accounts in a contact center have sales coaches to guide their agents to better offer their services or products. They will help you in transitioning an ordinary product or service inquiry into a sales pitch.

Coming from a sales coach, always remember that not all calls that you will receive as a sales agent are sales calls. You must understand that some customers call because they only want to know more about their options. In this case, you must listen to them first. Then, identify their pain-points by asking the right questions. After helping, not making, them realize their needs, you can casually proceed to informing, not selling, them of the products or services that best fit their needs. This way, you will not be hard selling.

So, once you hit the transition period, make sure to exhaust all the help that you can get to improve yourself as an agent so that once you’re in productions, hitting your goals will be easier.

Call Center Hiring And Training

"Thank you for calling Company X! This is John. How may I help you?"

This is a common greeting that you will hear when you call a company especially its call center. But what is it really like to work as a call center agent? Why are most of them working at night? Why is it that most of them have jackets? Have coffee? And are speaking in English even outside of their companies' premises?

Well, let me tell you a story and answer some questions that I think are top of mind for you.

The hiring process in a call center is somehow the same as how other companies in other industries do it. You can get selected for an interview by having a catchy resume when you apply online either by sending it directly to their recruitment team or by applying on LinkedIn, JobStreet, and any other job portals. It is also very much accepted if you'll just walk-in.

But as for my experience, it's better to apply first online so you will have someone to contact to get further instructions before arriving in the venue of the interview. Also, applying online first will save both you and the recruiter the time and other resources since the recruiter can conduct first a short phone interview to gauge your comm skills and the overall qualities that will determine if you will be a good fit for the company. If you'll pass this phone screening, the recruiter will invite you to their office for a face-to-face interview (can be group/panel interview and/or one-on-one) and some assessments.

Once you pass the initial interview, you will undergo a typing test to assess how fast and accurate you type words/phrases/sentences. Also, you will be given some other computer-based activities to test your people skills, decision-making skills, grammar, and your overall know-how of the language that you will be using while doing the job.

If you'll be hired, meaning you will get a job offer and you'll accept it, the company will require you to undergo a physical exam for that fit-to-work slip. Also, you will be asked to submit a copy of your NBI clearance, your TIN, SSS, PhilHealth, and Pag-Ibig numbers, and maybe at least two valid IDs for your payroll account (though most of the times, NBI clearance already serves as a valid ID). And take note that these should be done and submitted on or before the first day of your training.

Before the first day of your training, a member of the recruitment team will inform you of its time and venue. From my experience, training can either be scheduled to start as early as 0600AM or as late as 0200PM. And the venue is usually within the same building where you applied, just in a different floor.

On the first day of your training, it's totally acceptable if you will not be able to find your training room immediately. I experienced this twice already. First was because the security personnel just didn't know where the training room was. The second was because I was directed to a different training room by the receptionist. But don't worry, your trainer will understand this.

Just keep in mind that if ever you will be late on the first day of training, that should be your last incident. Because during your training, the company will also observe your punctuality as this is one of the most important attributes that call centers are looking for in their new hires. I had one co-trainee before who was absent for a day during our training period and because of that, he got moved to another training class that would be starting on a later date. It happened because he already missed a lot in just one day of absence. Yes! A day of training can already cover a lot of topics in your overall training agenda. Not only it will cause you to have a delayed production schedule but it may also get you terminated in some instances.

During your training period, you will be introduced first to the company that you will be working for: its values, mission, vision, and other things like that. You may also get some random visits from people in the operations management, workforce management, and human resources.

For the first five days, at least, you will be introduced to the culture of the country where you will be getting calls, chats, and/or e-mails from. Also, this is the part of the training where your communication skills and your know-how of English will be tested. You will be given oral drills, call listening sessions, computer-based activities, groupworks, and even mock calls to test your composure while handling a call. In the end, you will be given final test/s to assess your learning which can be either written/oral or both. Most of the times, all the trainees in your class will be able to move forward to the next stage of the training: product-specific training. But for those who will not be able to pass this toll gate, they will be endorsed to HR for the paperworks of their proper separation from the company.

Product-specific training is the part where you will be taught of the specifics of the product or service that you will be representing. The technical skills needed to execute the job will be taught in this stage too. And this will also be the part where you'll be allowed to handle live calls. The assessment of this training can be divided into different parts: one part can either be written/oral exam or both, another one can be your overall performance in handling a live call. If you'll pass this toll gate, you'll then be scheduled to take calls for a longer period of time with some mentoring time to further improve your call-handling until you're ready to take calls for eight hours in a day.

When it comes to the people who will be with you during the training period, you'll have trainer/s (depends if your culture trainer and product-specific trainer will be different), communication coach (or comm coach as known by many), and quality evaluator/s who will evaluate your calls according to some guidelines approved by the company and the client.

Most trainers are considerate enough if they see that you're doing your best. Some may even give you additional coaching sessions so they will be able to help you polish your skills, mostly it's just your communication skills. Aside from your trainer, you may also get additional help from a comm coach and/or from a quality evaluator.

Given the above pieces of information, I hope that somehow I'm able to give you ideas on how to get into the call center industry if you're planning to or maybe just inform you of the challenges and victories before a call center agent answers a live phone call, chat, and/or e-mail.