- Ace
- Jan 17, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 14, 2021
"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.
