Training and learning are not the same. Learning is what you do throughout your life. Training is something you do to become proficient at a skill or at your job.

The training you provide to agents in your call center reflects what you want agents to do. If your goal is to ensure new hires can handle calls, then displaying your training manual on your intranet isn't enough. Agents need the experience of working with people through role-playing, coaching during live calls and receiving evaluations of recordings of calls. Otherwise, computer-based training is about theory, not practice.

So what type of computer-based training is best? In our article about computer-based training a year ago, we distinguished between presentation-style training, which allows agents to understand concepts, and simulations, which let agents practice tasks like updating customers' records.

But training requirements in call centers haven't fit so neatly within these categories. During a time when it seems that call centers are competing with each other to employ the lowest-paid staff, the question isn't what training agents need. It's why agents need training at all.

This utilitarian thinking already pervades training departments, says Knowlagent's (Alpharetta, GA) cofounder and vice president of marketing, Matt McConnell, who observes that these departments often receive compensation "on the volume of content that gets to agents."

Compared to training managers, McConnell explains, operations managers usually have greater decision-making authority and a wider perspective about how (or if) training agents contributes to their companies.

Yet because companies expect training to contribute immediately to the bottom line, the prevailing aim among senior managers is to eliminate the lag between learning and doing. That's why the term "just-in-time," a popular adjective during the economically and technologically accelerated 1990s, has emerged in the context of call center training.

Whether call centers adopt just-in-time training will depend on what has the greater impact on performance: the content's relevance to agents, or the speed with which your call center delivers the content to agents.

In the end, the objectives of training and operations managers, as McConnell says, "don't need to be in conflict; they need to be linked."

There are two areas of standalone computer-based training for call centers: pre-packaged, self-paced content and tools for creating content specifically for call center agents.

Besides helping agents understand how to do their jobs better, training tools also need to provide guidance to those who coach agents, too.

Coaching has become an important complement to training, as it occurs while agents communicate with customers, rather than afterwards. And one significant trend with standalone call center training tools is that more of these tools can now make it easier to coach agents during calls.

Call Monitoring Contributes to Training

Call monitoring vendors account for one source of standalone training tools. Because these tools let you create training material without having to incorporate recordings of calls or screens, you don't need to purchase these vendors' call monitoring systems to use their training software.

For instance, Envision's (Seattle, WA) Envision eLearning is a standalone learning management system that lets you send files, including recordings of calls and screens, to agents over your network. The software also enables you to create training presentations, or distribute existing material you or outside companies have developed, throughout your company.

This approach allows you to send agents updates about policies and procedures right away. And it lets agents block out time to listen to or review examples of calls or screens that illustrate specific skills or behaviors.

Diane Williams, director of marketing with Envision, cites several examples of how Envision's clients deliver training material to agents. She says that one client, Borders, the book and music store chain, schedules agents to view training material during the first 15 minutes after they log in.

By contrast, says Williams, Blue Cross of Idaho uses Envision eLearning to determine when agents are idle before directing material to their computers. To ensure enough agents are available to answer calls, Blue Cross set up a rule so that no more than two agents are off the phone at the same time.

A third client, a grocery retailer and distributor that Envision declined to name, lets agents create training content, such as sequences of screens that explain how to use a particular piece of software.

By enabling agents to show each other how to perform various tasks, as this grocery company does, you introduce an empowering alternative to treating agents as passive recipients of platitudes dictated from on high. You encourage agents to participate and invest in developing the skills to succeed at their jobs.

"More different types of people are feeling better about getting involved in the training process," says Williams.

Some call monitoring vendors can show you how to build training content with their training modules. An example of one such vendor is etalk (Irving, TX), which offers a two-day seminar on how to create courses.

And one vendor, Witness Systems (Roswell, GA), provides, in addition to software for creating content, a full lineup of courses. Witness lets you disseminate these courses using its learning management system, eQuality Now. The courses themselves illustrate techniques for communicating better with customers, like how to ask questions or convey empathy.

Witness' standalone training module, eQuality Producer, lets you create training materials from scratch or from recordings of agents' conversations with customers and the screens that accompany them.

Besides the vendors we mentioned above, at least one simulation developer has begun to consider a role for recordings in training. Sivox (Lombard, IL), whose simulation tools debuted last year, is looking into the possibility of enabling clients to include recordings of actual calls from customers within the simulations they create.

Coaching Catches On

As many call monitoring vendors acknowledge, their training modules lend themselves to sharing information or demonstrations in a short period of time. "Its place is getting a piece of knowledge across," says Penny Reynolds, cofounder of The Call Center School (Lebanon, TN), which offers an on-line training curriculum, Call Center ABCs. "A new product update is perfect for e-learning."

But just as one does not become a great chef by watching a cooking show on television, it's unrealistic to expect agents to learn solely by watching or listening to others.

Last year, there was a lot of excitement about software that can simulate calls. The premise behind simulating calls is that you prevent agents from making mistakes with actual customers.

Sometimes, agents need the chance to make, and learn from, real-life mistakes. Indeed, the best lesson you can learn from training agents is less about tools and more about people. For agents to be receptive to developing their skills, you have to find the right people to train and coach them.

As Jeff Carpenter, vice president of client services with Sivox, says: "Your best agent doesn't necessarily make the best trainer or the best coach."

In keeping with the trend in call centers to combine training and coaching, several vendors include coaching products and services within their rosters of training tools.

Ulysses Learning (Mooresville, NC), for instance, offers services, in addition to its ServiceMentor, SalesMentor and CoachingMentor software, to help those who coach agents become more proficient at evaluating and presenting feedback to agents. Through its ProNet consultancy, Ulysses also certifies coaches, and even those who train coaches, in calibrating evaluations of agents.

In its release of Knowlagent 7, due out by the time you read this, Knowlagent will enable you not only to deliver and create training content, but track agents' actions - and provide immediate suggestions to agents - during calls. Knowlagent's McConnell expects that his company's clients will be most apt to use this capability to coach agents, especially those who most recently completed some new-hire training program.