We wrote this guide to help you identify the best Learning Management System (LMS) for your contact center. We first articulate the problems that you would like your LMS to solve. Next we explain the factors that prevent eLearning from being adopted in a contact center. Then we list the most important characteristics and features that your ideal LMS should have.

What's a major operational and logistical challenge contact centers face?

Getting their agents (both in-house and outsourced) trained and available on time to meet the business demands.

Agents need to be trained on specific products and processes in a specific timeframe. As a result, the training setup needs to be flexible to accommodate all of the following:

• regular new hire training programs
• scale new hire training due to seasonal ramp-ups (for e.g. annual sales)
• sudden needs for new product training or process and product update trainings
• regular and special assessments to ensure that agents are well-trained

Contact center training teams struggle to meet these requirements. And, it's understandable.

Typically, training teams for contact centers rely heavily on instructor-led training (ILT). Trainers spend a lot of time and effort on planning, managing and tracking the ILT programs.

When agents are spread across multiple cities or outsourced to various partners, the problem gets even more complicated.

As the training requirements increase, the organization needs more trainers to fulfill the demand.

Then there's the challenge of creating training content and keeping it up to date.

Since training is a human-intensive task, it is laborious, has a long feedback cycle and provides little visibility into the quality of training being delivered.

How can moving to eLearning solve these bottlenecks?

eLearning or online self-learning is well-suited to address the difficulties discussed above.

Let's define eLearning before moving forward:

• From the agents perspective:it means the agent receives interactive learning content that she goes through on her own. It is usually accompanied by some assessments.
• From the training team's perspective:it means getting the self-learning content for the required topics ready, and distributing the content to the right set of agents at the right time. Since all of this is done through an LMS, it is easy to monitor training completion and agent level performance.

Now let us see why eLearning fits the contact center training use case well.

Process and product related training forms a high proportion of the training that agents need to go through. These trainings not only lend well to eLearning, they are even better suited than ILTs.Agents can cover topics at their own pace, redo the learning when required and training teams get a clear sense of agents skill-levels based on the online assessments.

Most parts of the training related to customer interactions too can be moved to online learning. Online learning can be blended with ILT for the programs where online learning does not suffice. For e.g. soft skills training may need instructor led sessions.

Another challenge that eLearning meets is training agents at scale. The number of learners (agents) doesn't matter for online learning. As a result, eLearning is a perfect antidote to meeting erratic training demands effortlessly. Since the amount of instructor led training reduces, it allows the training teams to have a steady number of trainers and still meet the training demands.

What prevents the adoption of eLearning in contact centers?

Contact centers don't shy away from adopting technology. So, why is eLearning adoption so low? The answer lies in the fact that typical Learning Management Systems have some gaps and they do not solve the contact center training problem well. Here's what we mean.

As we discussed, product and process training forms the bulk of training at contact centers. The content for these training sessions tends to be dynamic. Training teams find it difficult to create the required volume of eLearning content at a short-notice (is there any training that does not happen at short notice ?). This makes eLearning both expensive as well as time-consuming.

So traditional LMS ends up being used just to deliver static training content - such as company policies, values, compliance policies, and other off-the-shelf courses. Most of the time. eLearning is adopted but it does not reduce the demand for ILT by much. No wonder that training teams treat adoption of eLearning as added work rather than something that would help them.

In order to manage the ILTs, organizations adopt a Training Management System (TMS).

Since most LMSs are not easy to use, trainers jump to online quizzing tools to conduct assessments. Even when eLearning applications are being used, training teams rely on a lot of third party apps to generate assessment activities such as quizzes.

So even when an organization adopts eLearning, they are dependent on different systems:

• An LMS - for online learning
• Quiz apps - to conduct training assessments
• A TMS - to plan, schedule, and manage training logistics
• And an MIS - to conduct overall reporting of training

What role does an MIS have to play in this?

Imagine getting data from an LMS, assessment software and TMS. How do you make sense of data from these different sources and get an overview? So training teams create an MIS to consolidate data. MIS is then used to generate meaningful reports.

In addition, imagine the trouble needed to provide access to agents for all the required systems. It's a logistical and management nightmare.

Which type of eLearning system suits contact centers?

To solve all training requirements, contact centers need an all-round LMS that:

• Is an LMS that enables trainers to move bulk of their training online
• Is an easy platform to conduct assessments on
• Has all the TMS features to plan, manage and capture Instructor Led Trainings
• Combines data from all the above to generate meaningful reports and insights

When you are looking for an LMS that would work in your contact center environment, make sure that it ticks all the above boxes.

Nittio Learn is exactly that. It is an LMS built to suit the needs of a contact center.

Want to know how Nittio Learn LMS can help your contact center? Click here to learn more or schedule a demo by clicking here.