How to Create a Learning Culture in Your Contact Centres
With Craig McFadyen, Director at LearningPlanet
Show Notes
Craig McFadyen is Director of LearningPlanet. He has over 30 years’ experience in the contact centre industry, and has been at the forefront of providing training services to the industry for more than two decades.
As a result, he’s got fantastic insight into how to create a learning culture in your contact centres, as well as how to take advantage of the latest trends in contact centre training.
Top 3 Tips:
A learning culture starts at the top. Where there’s executive level buy-in to the importance of training, it cascades right down the organisation and transforms the entire culture (03:09).
You don’t need as large a budget as you might think. With the online training that’s accessible these days, you don’t need a big budget to have a big impact (12:33).
Be responsive to the new trends and technologies that are coming through. They’re shaking up how contact centre training needs to be done (12:47).
You'll Learn:
The common mistake made in the selection of contact centre trainers (which sets them up to fail) and how to solve it (04:42).
The 2 trends in contact centre training which are likely hurting the training your agents get (06:41).
The next frontier of contact centre training, that will bring vital content to the fingertips of your people (07:32).
The approach some contact centres are taking, which means agents are being trained before they even start their job (09:37).
How the typical training approach goes completely against how most agents learn, and what to do about it (10:51).
Connect with Craig here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcfadyen/
Get your free copy of Game On here: https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book (you’ll also get the latest podcast episodes sent straight to your inbox).
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and brightest minds in the industry.
I'm Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak, the High-Performance Coaching System for Contact Centres. It helps you to create and sustain a world-class coaching culture, so you can beat your targets without burning people out.
Today, I'm joined by Craig McFadyen. Craig's the Director of LearningPlanet, and he'll be well-known to many New Zealand listeners because of his long experience of providing training services to contact centres, through several companies he's run with his partner, Derek Good.
He's also long-sponsored the Contact Centre Institute of New Zealand, which is now known as the Customer Contact Network of New Zealand.
Today, he's got some great tips for us on training and development, general advice based on his extensive experience, and the trends he's noticing worldwide.
So Craig, welcome along.
Craig McFadyen (00:58)
Fantastic. Thanks to be here. Thanks for having me Blair. Good to see you again.
Blair Stevenson (01:03)
Hey, just for the people who ... listeners who don't know, just fill us in with a bit about your expertise and experience.
Craig McFadyen (01:12)
Yeah. Well, [I’m] long in the tooth, over 30 years background in contact centers.
I think I was one of the lucky people. I was in sales and I fell into contact centers in England, completely by accident. Absolutely loved the industry and went up through the ranks. I started as an agent on the phones, progressed up through team leader, call center manager.
And then when I moved to New Zealand in the nineties, we didn't even have call centers. We were still in the days of tele-marketing. So I ended up working for Ernst & Young in setting up the call center consulting division for New Zealand. And then a little while after that went out on my own and never looked back.
We saw the explosion of call centers happen in New Zealand and there was a big American trend. The Americans were really pushing the technology and they were saying, you know, “The way for good contact centers is PABX (Private Automated Business Exchanges) and automation”, and I saw a gap for people. I just thought nobody was focusing on the people side of call centers.
So I started my first business around training the people and focusing on the people, and I've spent the last 20 plus years focusing on that with one company or another.
So yeah. Fair bit of background there.
Blair Stevenson (02:29)
Totally, totally. So you're just the guy to talk about what you see is working and not.
So one of the things that you've mentioned is over the past 25 years or so, you've noticed three barriers to staff development in contact centres. One of those you specifically mentioned is a lack of a learning culture.
So I'm just kind of interested in sort of a two-part question really. What do you mean by that term learning culture? And when you walk into a contact center, what are the kinds of indicators to you as to whether or not there's a strong learning culture there?
Craig McFadyen (03:09)
Yeah. It's one of those intangibles, right? But everybody's got the gut instinct. So I think the learning culture starts right from the outset. And it starts right from the hiring practice, right through induction, out on the floor you're doing regular coaching, you're doing regular meetings.
But I think more than that, I think the culture starts at the top. And it's talked about at executive level, and it comes down from there. And the organizations where we've got executive level buy-in, and understanding and belief in training, in the importance of training, changes the entire culture. And you'll see that come down and cascade right down through the whole organization.
Blair Stevenson (03:54)
Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to have a chat with you is because, you know, my focus is around helping organizations build a strong coaching culture. And there's such strong integration between what you're talking about in terms of learning culture and a coaching culture.
And as you rightly point out, both of those are driven - have to be driven - top down. But I'm just curious about your experience in terms of contact centre trainers. My observation in many contact centres is I wouldn't say that contact centre trainers are professional trainers. They tend to be - in my experience - high potential agents, or high potential team leaders, who rotate into that role for a period of time.
Has that been your experience as well?
Craig McFadyen (04:42)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's the same in any role; just because you're good at your job doesn't mean you're going to be a good trainer. You know, just because you're the top salesman in the team, doesn't mean you're going to be a good sales manager.
I think the same with the agents. They've been there awhile, they've got the company knowledge, they've got the product knowledge, they're really good with the customers. So then they get promoted to be a trainer, but they don't get the training to do it. And then they wonder why they’re awkward, or it crashes or it burns, or they don't enjoy it.
And I think that's really setting people up to fail.
Blair Stevenson (05:17)
Yeah. So that being the case, what sort of external assistance do you think most contact centre trainers require to do the best job for the agents and the team leaders that they're working with?
Craig McFadyen (05:31)
Yeah. I think, obviously, the first thing is if you're going to put somebody in that role, the most important thing is to just put them through a Train the Trainer program. Just because they're good at their job, they don't know about learning cultures or channels, or, you know, accelerated learning techniques or how to get the message across.
And it doesn't matter if it's classroom, or e-learning or whatever role they're going to be doing, the more skills and foundation we can give them about how people learn, how to get the message across, we're going to help them be more successful and more enjoyable in the role. And therefore, hopefully, they'll go onto a training career like mine.
Blair Stevenson (06:12)
Yes. Perfect. So, you know, as you mentioned earlier, you've been in this kind of contact center business, but also training business, for a long time. So I'm just curious, what are the key trends that you're now seeing in play, that you perhaps anticipate growing even stronger over the coming years?
Craig McFadyen (06:41)
Well, I mean, we started, we were one of the first companies in New Zealand to put the contact centre qualification into e-learning. We saw a gap in the market.
So we went to look for an e-learning platform. And back then, 15, 17 years ago, there was just, there was nothing out there. We spent nine months searching the globe looking for a platform, and found a really good one right here in Auckland, believe it or not.
But since then, we've seen the deployment out of America of the rapid cheap e-learning platforms, that most organizations will now have one - or more than one - of. And so what happens is everybody now becomes an e-learning expert, and there's these two things coming in here.
One is "Thanks very much, Mr. Consultant or external people like us. You know, we don't need you anymore because we can do it ourselves."
(07:32)
And the other one is [the idea that] if you're a really good designer, therefore you must be a really good e-learning consultant. And it's frightening because again, there's no training experience behind the design. So it looks flashy, but may not work.
So trends now that we've seen, after about five or eight years of these platforms being in the market, is we're now realizing companies are realizing once they put their processes and their products and their systems online, it's taken them on average about two to two-and-a-half years before they get around to the soft skills training. And that's the average measure that we're seeing.
And so what's happening now because of the global financial crisis, because that took all of the fat out of the system. You know, I'll give an example.
When I first started training, I would run three-day customer service workshops with 20 staff. If I said that now, people would just laugh me out of the business. You know, they'll say "I'll give you two people for half an hour. What can you do?" You know? So we don't have that fat in the system anymore that we used to.
So that's where e-learning - and now micro-learning - have really come into their own. And now organizations are starting to realize they don't have the time, the budget or the expertise to create the same level of content that external companies like you and I can create for them.
So we're now seeing the shift, and the next trend we're going to start hearing more about is curated content. So this is where organizations in the research that we're doing all around the world, organizations are now having a full-time role of people who are collecting that information from different sources. Be it podcasts, be it videos, be it PDFs. And they bring in that together in a library in the organization. So it's all in one place.
But off the shelf, curated content is definitely going to be the way forward.
Blair Stevenson (09:26)
Great. So with those trends in mind, what do you consider - or now consider - best practice for contact center training?
Craig McFadyen (09:37)
Well, I've always believed that it should come from the top down. You know, you should have a training voice in the most senior level that you can.
Start at recruitment. We've even got people who start pre-recruitment. So if they've hired somebody and the person has to give two weeks notice, they'll now send out a link to LearningPlanet with a list of videos and say, "We want you to do this training before you even start".
You know, what a great way to start at a new company. "They're training me and I haven't even walked through the door yet". So, you know, it really starts to set that culture before they even walk in.
And then just continue that all the way through. Have a really good, robust induction program. Do regular coaching. Have regular meetings and have lots of conversations throughout the organization about the importance of training. And, you know, give people that career path and give them every support that you can and train them for the next role instead of the current one.
Blair Stevenson (10:36)
Yeah. And you and I were talking about, before this podcast, about the fact that most agents now fall into that Millennial generation. And, you know, one of the key things that Millennials are looking for is development.
Craig McFadyen (10:51)
Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you don't give it to them, they'll go and find it themselves. I mean, they're the first generation that has grown up with everything on demand. You know, they've got everything at their fingertips. They'll watch a movie, they find what whatever information they want at their fingertips.
And then they come and work for us, and they've had all this experience at school and Uni, and we welcome them into our company and we lock them in a classroom for two weeks for their induction, and give paperwork this thick. And we wonder why they don't come back tomorrow.
So one of the things we have to do is we have to be adaptive for the next generations coming through, and understand that our old ways of training need to be changed to suit those new channels and the new ways that people want to learn.
And if not, they'll go off and they'll find their own way of doing it. And it may not be right.
Blair Stevenson (11:42)
Yeah, totally. So, just to finish up, what are your top three tips for contact center leaders for how they structure the training they're providing to predominantly their agents, but also how they support the trainers in the first place?
Craig McFadyen (12:05)
Tip #1 (12:05)
I think number one is you've got to have it in the culture. It's got to be talked about, right the way down through the levels. Have open discussions about career pathing, and what training people need. And really just make sure the training fits in with the strategic goals of the organization. So people can see the role that they're playing and how that fits in to the bigger picture, so that they can see where they fit into the moving cogs of the organization.
Tip #2 (12:33)
Budget. Obviously budget is always a hard discussion to have, but you know what? You can fight for it and you can get it. And these days with all of the online [training], you actually don't need a lot of budget to have a big impact.
Tip #3 (12:47)
And really just be responsive. Be responsive to the new people, the new trends, the new challenges and technologies that are coming through.
Blair Stevenson (12:57)
And there's been so much change, even over the last decade. It's been massive. Yeah.
Thank you, Craig. That's all we've got time for today. And just want to say big thank you for coming on the show. You've given us some great tips on what works in training and development, and also in the trends that you're seeing.
Now for listeners, you'll find a link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Craig on LinkedIn, you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in that description as well (https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmcfadyen/).
Now, if you've tuned in today looking for a way to create and sustain a world-class coaching culture, so you can beat your targets without burning people out, have I got an offer for you!
You're welcome to a free copy of my book Game On: How to Increase Sales, Productivity, and Customer Experience by Turning Your Managers into High-Performance Coaches.
The link to that offer is also in the episode description below (https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book).
Well, that's it from us this week, have a productive week.