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The Bold New Frontier Of Hosted Training By Lee Hollman
Training agents at your call center may be a necessity, but licensing a computer-based training (CBT) solution is not. Agents can also take on-line tutorials using software that vendors host from their servers and deliver to users' PCs through the Internet. The majority of computer-based training vendors have, in fact, morphed into application service providers (ASPs) by supplementing - or supplanting - on-site CD-ROM products with hosted versions.
The reason: increased popularity of hosted software. Vendors note that hosted CBT products are less burdensome financially because call center managers don't have to make the substantial purchases in hardware and software necessary for installing software on-site. Call centers can also customize a hosted training curriculum to meet specific or changed needs. CD-ROM lessons, by contrast, may require using and reusing the same lessons. And multisite call centers using hosted software can distribute courses through the Internet quickly and efficiently to agents working at separate locations.
"The overall administrative management of training is extremely difficult on CD-ROM," says Rusty Gordon, president and CEO of Knowlagent (Alpharetta, GA), which stopped offering training software on disc. "With the improvements in the backbone of the Internet and Web browser availability, we didn't feel it was necessary anymore. And our customers no longer request it."
Underpinning the growth of the hosted model, say observers, is the fact that the Web is becoming the dominant medium for call center applications - training or otherwise. The Internet, and ease of on-the-fly reprogramming enabled by HTML, allows for dynamic and continuous improvements to products and their immediate distribution to clients worldwide.
But Frank Russell, president and CEO of GeoLearning (West Des Moines, IA), a provider of hosted CBT solutions, concedes that some call centers remain wary of hosted training software. "The number one fear is security," he says. "If you have proprietary information specific to your business, you want that protected."
And though hosted solutions are on the rise in North America and Europe, computer-based training with CD-ROMs remains standard practice in some regions.
"The CD-ROM is more prevalent in countries where Internet connectivity is still not as advanced, like in South America and in certain parts of Asia and Africa," says Rajeev Venkat, senior director of solutions marketing for SmartForce (Redwood City, CA). "But I would say its use has declined. My guess is that it's in the 25% range."
The vendors we interviewed also don't recommend replacing live training with a purely software-based model - be it hosted or on-site. They agree that a "blended" approach, including classroom and computer-based training, works best. Agents can receive personal attention from a classroom instructor and use training software to review what they've studied. That speeds the learning curve. Vendors also say that blended training is a common practice among clients.
"I don't think that classroom training will go away," says GeoLearning's Russell. "I do think we're moving toward a blended world, where part of training can be done on-line and part of it can be done live."
Russell recommends a CBT solution to achieve consistency in training. Some in-classroom instructors are unbeatable; but many are mediocre - or worse. And though computer-based training isn't as intimate as classroom instruction, good CBT vendors compensate by making solutions interactive.
"You don't have the ability to read faces, so you need to find ways to get agents to participate and learn by interacting," says John Walber, COO of HorizonLive (New York, NY). "You need to ask more questions, throw out some open-ended concepts and let students chat on their own."
Blended training will also help agents adjust to training software if they've never used it before. The challenge is finding the right software package for your business. Here's a look at the latest CBT products and services, including hosted solutions that are changing the nature of training.
HOSTED CBT SOLUTIONS
GeoLearning lets you build a custom "on-line university" with GeoLearning Center, hosted software that simulates classroom learning. Agents navigate through a virtual building among five floors with classrooms. There are also "conference rooms" where agents participate in live Web-based seminars; and a "library" where they can request educational material through the Web or postal mail. The virtual building also includes a "student lounge," a chat room where agents can discuss what they've learned.
GeoLearning's Russell says the company consults with clients to develop the on-line curriculum for as long as a month, depending on how many courses clients want to create. Russell adds that sometimes GeoLearning also storyboards lessons, like a film or television script, to give clients a picture of how the finished product will look.
Baltimore, MD-based outsourcer Sitel uses GeoLearning Center to train agents at call centers in 20 countries. Russell says the software's 3-D environment helped Sitel bridge the cultural gap among agents by making the same training accessible to all in a format they could relate to. Agents took the classes in person so they could easily adapt to registering for courses and attending them in a virtual world.
GeoLearning also offers GeoLearning Express, a simpler version of GeoLearning Center that takes agents through one floor of virtual classrooms. In addition, the company can host training software from other vendors or convert your hard copy training materials to a Web-based format.
When Russell founded GeoLearning four years ago, he anticipated that 50% of clients would want to run training software from their servers. Currently, 95% use the hosted service.
Why? Customers like the fact that GeoLearning hosts the service from secure servers, limiting access to on-line training through a user ID and password prompt. And they prefer the convenience and lower cost of the hosted model to the personnel and equipment costs of a customer premise-based training system.
Both GeoLearning Center and GeoLearning Express, including a course design capability, start at $49 per user. The two ASP solutions accommodate 500 to 3,000 and 2,500-plus agents, respectively. You pay an additional fee to incorporate third-party training software into lesson plans. GeoLearning's options for converting existing training material to a Web-based format begin with posting a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show on-line for approximately $2,500.
KnowDev 6.0, the latest upgrade to Knowlagent's hosted software suite, lets you generate reports and view information from multiple call centers. You can, for example, view agents' performance statistics across call centers in five locations. Previous versions only created reports for each center.
KnowDev 6.0 comprises four modules. KnowDev Builder creates courses in an application development environment. You use KnowDev Manager to schedule courses. KnowDev Reports generates reports that detail on-line test results for each lesson. KnowDev Student distributes training through a Web browser.
Knowlagent also expanded KnowDev's training capabilities by releasing Virtual Customer in February 2002. The hosted service marks Knowlagent's call center simulation debut. Agents listen to recordings of simulated calls or view call scripts and respond to "customers" by selecting one of several multiple-choice answers. Average pricing for KnowDev 6.0 with Virtual Customer and technical support services is $1,000 per agent. That price varies if you use Knowlagent's consulting services to, for example, create customized training content.
Other hosted solutions provide training from your company's Web site, like Sherpa from Rapid Performance Systems (Los Gatos, CA). When agents log on to the Web site and enter user IDs and passwords, they can view on-line lessons, previous courses taken and their performance on exercises.
Jay Lord, vice president of marketing for Rapid Performance Systems, says the company can customize courses. You can create text-only or multimedia lessons, but every course usually has the same interface.
A left-side screen menu provides a list of every lesson. Agents view lessons by clicking on the title. For easy retrieval, they can also bookmark lessons. Clicking on a control bar at the bottom of the screen rewinds, fast forwards, stops and pauses lessons. After completing training, agents can take an on-line test to review their knowledge and receive coaching through audio and visual prompts.
Pricing for Sherpa depends on the number of agents using the software, regardless of the type of media used to create courses. A starting price of $450 per agent accommodates ten agents or fewer, or as little as $75 per agent with volume discounts.
HorizonLive 2.5 from HorizonLive (New York, NY) delivers streaming video, audio and animated lessons through a Web browser. The service encourages agents to interact during training. Agents can, for example, communicate with the instructor and co-workers using text chat and shared whiteboards, and by pushing Web pages. You can ask agents questions on-line; agents write answers or select multiple-choice options from a Web page. The software can also conduct polls among agents and generate graphs to measure responses.
At a brokerage and investment firm, for example, brokers view on-line slide presentations with a case study about a customer's situation and enter answers for handling that situation on-line. Afterward, they can check the poll results to learn about co-workers' ideas. Supervisors publish the best answers on the Web.
"It's not a quizzing or testing scenario as much as a reinforcement scenario," says Horizon's Walber. "It's very similar to stand-up learning, where the instructor gets up to pose a question."
Agents can also learn from each other in chat rooms. "Having an instructor leading the class is still the norm, but we want to have a place for students to interact," says Walber. But he adds that you can't just assemble a chat room and demand that agents communicate. The software lets agents push graphics and documents to each other to discuss projects and issues. You can track chat sessions to view what agents said, files they viewed together and Web sites they visited. Afterward, you can play back sessions to agents. You can also create new content to train agents on-line, instead of reworking the same lessons using licensed software. Pricing was not available at press time.
Contact Center SolutionSets from SmartForce is also available as a CD-ROM, making it different from most hosted solutions. Contact Center SolutionSets comprises six hosted training modules offering basic call center skills, like building customer loyalty and phone etiquette. SmartForce offers additional modules for customer support, sales and technical support agents.
SmartForce's Rajeev Venkat says that most of SmartForce's customers prefer the hosted version because of the additional training options. Call center managers can offer Web seminars; and agents can use the Ask Your Mentor feature. Agents text chat with an expert (such as MCSE-certified technicians) about the material that they're studying. SmartForce's 150 support staffers provide 24-hour assistance.
In addition to working with SmartForce's training modules, you can create courses using authoring tools like Macromedia's CourseMedia and Dreamweaver. SmartForce offers software templates for Macromedia's software to design courses. SmartForce's internal service staff tests the lessons before making them available to agents on-line. "We make sure you haven't created something that can bring an entire system down," says Venkat.
Contact Center SolutionSets, including training modules and the mentoring option, begins at $500 per agent, for up to 150 agents. You pay as little as $150 per agent for 4,000 agents or more.
Training Explained
Following is a list of computer-based training vendors.
AchieveGlobal
Employment Technologies
GeoLearning
HorizonLive
Knowlagent
Rapid Performance Systems
SmartForce
Simtrex
Witness Systems
Why Call Centers Use Hosted Software - And Why They Don't
Todd Beck, service product manager for Achieve Global (Tampa, FL), says that the upper management at many companies use hosted software to avoid conflict with other departments. "They're not really working well with departments like IT," he says.
But Beck says that off-site hosting sometimes lets call centers install training software on-site. "It's not unusual for a single call center to outsource hosting simply to shortcut internal bureaucracy," says Beck. "Sometimes that's a temporary plan, allowing them to begin training quickly while they build a case for installing software in-house."
Beck also warns call center managers to think carefully about their motivations for using computer-based training.
"It typically boils down to a desire to try something they haven't done before," he says. "Whether that's because it's a novelty since everybody's talking about it, or they think it's a panacea - a fix for a specific problem. None of those are legitimate reasons."
But if these are the wrong reasons for using computer-based training, what are the right reasons? "We'll remind customers of things like return on investment," he says. "That gets people into a rational mindset. They forget the hype and remember that it's results they're after."
Achieve Global's Service Difference Suite comprises hour-long lessons that are available in hosted and licensed versions. Healing the Customer Relationship, a hosted service, lets agents respond to simulated calls from irate customers. Licensed options from Achieve Global include Extraordinary Service for sharpening customer service skills; and Professional Selling Skills MultiMedia Plus for polishing sales techniques.
You pay $75 per agent to train agents on-line with Service Difference Suite. Extraordinary Service software comprises 21 15-minute lessons and costs $160 per agent to license the CD-ROM version. Pricing for licensing Professional Selling Skills is $450 per agent. This includes 12 hours of software-based training and supplementary print materials for an additional 12 hours for classroom training.
Arguing for On-Site Software
Despite the advantages of hosted software, there are reasons to consider on-site training. Nancy Treaster, senior vice president of marketing for Witness Systems (Roswell, GA), notes that call centers beginning to use training software prefer running it from their servers. "When they don't know the technology all that well, they want to keep it close to them," she says.
Treaster says most of Witness' customers haven't requested a hosted version of eQuality Now software, which provides training to agents through a Web browser. Many of these customers want to first centralize the CD-ROM software at an on-site server before considering a hosted model.
You can install eQuality Now on each agent's PC or on a Windows NT server. Treaster says the majority of Witness Systems' customers run the software on agents' PCs, though she's seen a recent increase in the server-based approach among clients. eQuality Now works with other eQuality products. These include apps that record phone calls, capture agents' screens and create customized forms to evaluate agents' performance. You can use agents' recorded conversations and data captured from their PCs to create training lessons.
Witness Systems offers 35 training courses for eQuality Now, up from the ten marketed in 2001. These courses develop customer service skills like good listening habits, demonstrating empathy, handling stress and effective note taking during calls. Treaster says that most call centers prefer to use Witness' courses before designing their own.
"What we found is, starting with a blank sheet was a bit overwhelming, even though they do develop a lot of custom content," she says. "They needed to start with something. The more they have, the easier it is to get the ball rolling."
All Witness Systems' courses focus on customer service essentials, making them especially useful for training new agents.
"We found that the return on investment for computer-based training was more dramatic if you can reduce new hire training expenses," says Treaster. "Our expectation was to improve the skills of existing agents, but more customers got involved with the new hires."
Call center managers who want to design Web-based training curriculum can use eQuality Now with authoring applications like DreamWorks and ToolBook. Treaster says that her clients design courses primarily to instruct agents about products and services their companies offer.
She adds that computer-based training provides certain advantages to new hires that they don't have in a classroom situation. "Agents like the electronic classroom because they can take and retake courses at their own pace," she says. "They need to be reminded of what they do in the classroom. And some people are embarrassed to ask questions and to ask instructors to slow down in front of a group."
eQuality Now's starting software license of $66,500 accommodates 100 agents. The hosted version begins at $200 for 100 agents and five courses.
Q&A With Simtrex CEO Craig Richards
Associate Editor Lee Hollman spoke with Craig Richards, CEO of Simtrex (Atlanta, GA), developer of the StarTrainer call simulation software. The Windows NT-based product, which starts at $150,000, sports an Audio Server that connects to your PBX to record sample "customer" calls and route them to agents through your PBX. The Courseware Server enables agents to enter and retrieve data from their PCs through a Web browser. Following are excerpts of the interview.
Q: Craig, with hosted training software gaining popularity among call centers, have you considered creating a hosted version of StarTrainer?
A: Hosted software was really in vogue two years ago, although it's a little less so now after the dot-com debacle. But we were talking with the telco Qwest, and they wanted a hosted solution. So we went back to our technical people to determine whether or not we could offer a hosted solution, and the answer was "Yes, we can." It would provide them with everything we do today as an ASP-type model.
I would like to go in that direction, but no one's pushed us there yet. Truth be known, I really don't want to do it for the next twelve months because there's a lot of infrastructure that we'd have to provide to do that. Had the deal with Qwest gone far enough, that might have made more sense because that would've been a huge deal.
Q: So you haven't received any particular demand for a hosted version of StarTrainer among Simtrex's customers?
A: We deal with a lot of vice president of operations of call centers, and I don't know that they think about it. Also, I think one of the nice things about our product is that since we install it on two servers, we're not really an aggravation to the IT people. And IT understandably gets concerned from a security perspective when people install software on a remote server. I'm not saying that's why people don't ask for an ASP model. But we don't raise the eyebrows of the IT people like a hosted solution would.
Q: Given that licensing training software can be costly, how can Simtrex compete with the cost advantages of hosted training?
A: A lot of people at call centers are used to buying software on a cost per agent basis. And a lot of folks are used to paying for perpetual licenses. I know that everybody's under budget pressure, so we can help you go forward with a leasing program. In essence, you're paying for StarTrainer monthly. It gives the customer another alternative in terms of licensing the software.
Q: The Simtrex Web site says that agents trained on StarTrainer can handle calls 41% faster than agents trained through "traditional methods." What methods are these, and what type of study did you conduct to find that percentile?
A: That 41% came from Hilton Reservations Worldwide, one of our customers. We really replaced role-playing, which has always been a big part of the training that agents go through at call centers. Also buddying, where you've got an experienced agent sitting with a rookie; and nesting, where you get a group of new agents that sit together and raise hands when they have an issue so that one of the experienced people can come assist them. Those are things they were able to replace so that they were able to achieve performance faster.
One customer, Coventry Health, indicated that as a result of cutting two days out of their "buddy time," the company saved 800 days of productivity over 12 months by putting agents on the phone two days earlier than they did before.
Q: Would you say that improved agent efficiency also leads to reduced turnover at most call centers?
A: Agents have internal and external pressures. They want to provide service effectively. But they know they're getting measured internally for call quality, handling, etc. I think that with training they know what to expect, and it results in giving them the confidence they need to do the job.
With Hilton we had a group doing traditional training and a separate group doing StarTrainer. The StarTrainer group had a 33% lower attrition rate after 12 weeks. Two of the people were getting ready to quit, and we put them through the next StarTrainer class.
Something else I find funny happened two years ago when we had a study done at the DuPree College of Management at Georgia Institute of Technology. They discovered that agents who used StarTrainer had a higher "pleasantness" rating. I could only guess that because they had more confidence and experience, they could focus more on the interaction with a customer.
Q: On a final note, what advice would you offer to call center managers researching computer-based training options for their call center?
A: It's important for people to determine their objective for computer-based training. If the objective is to allow agents to develop skills, the solution needs to replicate real-life conditions. Does it allow them to practice listening to customers? They need to evaluate what software will provide them with skills as opposed to just giving them knowledge. There's a place for giving them knowledge, but they need to develop skills to be effective.
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