An improving economy means that consumers are increasingly demanding better quality service. But it also means that agents who stayed in their jobs because there were few other opportunities available are now able to move to different employers.

In short, call center managers and executives must train to retain: customers, agents, coaches/supervisors, and their own domestic call centers to justify the high costs of keeping call centers in the US.

"Training must refocus on strategies - from the perspective of the customer - that increase customer retention and revenue," says Kathy Dean, principal, Banks and Dean (Milwaukee, WI, and Toronto, Ontario, Canada). "Agents have an impact on customer retention and they must be trained to improve that interaction."

The key to quality training is to examine the data that you collect from call monitoring and customer surveys. You need to drill this information down to individual agent performance to determine the root cause of problems, such as whether they are caused by flaws in the organization or particular individuals.

Maybe customers are dissatisfied because they don't like the product's quality or price. Or they found they were being rushed off the phones every time they called. Or that they spoke with agents who were abrupt or rude.

Todd Beck, service portfolio senior product manager with AchieveGlobal (Tampa, FL), finds more of what he calls systematic training where organizations look at the entire process to discover the problems and then propose and implement the correct fixes. Before this systematic approach, much of the training Beck witnessed was reactive: the call center receives the customer satisfaction survey, the numbers are down, and management decides to train just the frontline agents.

"Too often after such narrow training call centers have found the results were not much different from before the training," says Beck. "Why? Because they didn't look at the issue systematically: they didn't investigate to find the root causes and deal with them."