We all found ourselves in a situation where many processes are urgently transferred to online status. And the work of support at this moment is especially important. Operators need to handle a lot more user requests and not go crazy.
Today we have prepared materials on how we train our operators. We will share the secrets and life hacks that helped us create a super support team ready for any situation in the world.
First of all, it is useful for a beginner to take a real user and go through the path of working with the service together, to conduct accounting. In such a situation, the operator will figure out who to go to for specific information, understand what is not working, what cases the user wants to implement and what problems he faces. And you can analyze what a new employee is capable of and what skills need to be pumped. Do not forget to warn the user that a newbie is working with them
If you give a beginner typical tasks or already worked out cases, then the operator will not have the motivation and the ultimate goal. Such cases are not useful, since they are artificially created and cut off from the client. We recommend that you call up at the initial stage and try to help the client in a real conversation. Thus, a beginner trains the skill of real communication, learns to solve a problem and find the necessary information..
Pay attention to the theoretical part of the training. Don’t dump on the new employee all the information he needs to know – give him the opportunity to freely dispose of time to study the material. Set a time limit when you will check the studied material in a dialogue format and how much the operator has mastered it.
In the GotYourBack Support team, basic theoretical concepts are framed in trello cards. One card – one week. There are several topics for each week with links to articles that need to be studied. Thus, the operator can move from one topic to another at will.
After the theoretical stage, let the operator solve case issues from the technical support dialogues. Take a random dialogue or give a simple closed dialogue. The goal of the operator is not to get scared and to bring the dialogue to the end, so that the user thanks and leaves happy. For each such case, a beginner needs to keep a detailed diary so that you can analyze and discuss the pros and cons.
Use knowledge bases to help solve ready-made cases. An external customer knowledge base and an internal technical knowledge base will help. Do not require a beginner to cram the whole theory – he needs to learn how to turn to it from time to time.
The purpose of such cases is not just to put all the knowledge into the operator at once, but to teach them how to navigate the information so that he knows who to contact and in which program to find the answer. But this will not work quickly: such a skill will come only with experience.
An operator in the IT field needs to navigate scripts, programming languages, and understand customer problems. Free resources help with this: there are many courses and articles on the Internet. To understand the peculiarity of the food environment, we recommend reading “The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you” Robert Fitzpatrick.
When a beginner cannot solve a problem on his own, do not refuse to help him. Promise to help, but let the operator first tell you how he tried to resolve the issue himself. During such reflection, a person will understand that somewhere he himself did not get it, did not search, and thus learns to solve problems.
The duration of onboarding depends on which position the person is going to. If this is a standard daytime operator who will independently resolve customer issues, the average training time is 3 months:
▪️ the first month and a half, the operator learns to independently search for the necessary information;
▪️ the rest of the time the operator learns to communicate with the user and independently understand his problem, or know who to contact.
Do not get carried away with controlling a newbie: do not allow a situation that for 3 months the team lead sits over a person and checks how he works. The operator must be willing to seek new things and strive for independence.
▪️ Make a list of theoretical questions that the employee should understand by the end of onboarding: from understanding what materials are in the knowledge bases to navigating the service. The operator must at the logical level understand what is happening in the API, be able to read scripts, etc.
▪️ Look at the number of dialogs it processes in a given time. But speed in the first 3 months is not the most important thing, this skill will come with experience. The most important thing is to know where to find a solution and how to behave in a certain situation with the user. A person should work as a full-fledged operator, albeit very slowly.
▪️ Set checkpoints for each week of training, when the operator can demonstrate his soft skills, show how he assimilates information about the product. Check out a newbie, even if he has a lot of experience in support. If an employee avoids onboarding tasks and stretches it, then he has problems, and they need to be dealt with immediately.
▪️ Use the 360 framework when your team is evaluating a new employee. This method helps to reveal personal qualities. For example, a new employee is rude to people in a team, but does not do this with a supervisor. This will become clear when the team is polled.
You can upgrade some individual skills, but individually, since the employee must have internal motivation. If immersion in new tasks is quick and comfortable, then you can give something new, and if not, then you should not load. It is impossible to schedule the development of an employee for three years in advance.
You can watch how operators solve problems. But at the same time, do not create an atmosphere of constant control. It is worth admitting a not quite ideal solution for a person to make progress. For a change, operators can take on individual projects.
Take a real project and go through all the errors with a user who is warned about a novice operator.
Try to skip non-critical errors initially. It can be hard for a newbie from the many nuances in which they are trying to help him. The presence of criticism and training should be dosed.
In the learning stages, go from discussing major flaws to minor ones, put off polishing until the last moment, let the person adapt.
Don’t try to do everything for the employee. Give the opportunity to be creative and come up with solutions on your own as quickly as possible. If you do everything for a person, he may just get used to it. Let the employee calculate the time for their tasks on their own.
