Problem:
Our contact center (which up until this point was solely an inbound center) was tasked with making outbound calls offering information about our product to healthcare providers around the country. Nobody in the company had made any such calls yet, so our agents would be first. Additionally, none of our existing customer relationship management or telephony systems could house an easy-to-use script for agents to reference while making the calls.
Approach:
I generally follow a blended learning approach when it comes to training and did so for this course. I created an eLearning course in Articulate Storyline 360 which served as a prerequisite for an instructor-led workshop. The eLearning covered foundational material and an overview of the system and script. Once they completed that, the instructor-led workshop included scenario-based practice sessions.
eLearning Creation:
I met with Subject Matter Experts from our Sales and Marketing teams to get a better understanding of the foundations of outbound call campaigns. From this, I created the best practices and background sections of the training. As new parts of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool were built to support the campaign, I also created an interactive walk-through of the updates. Then, I took the script and created a branching scenario module. With this, agents were presented with an easy-to-use script that would give them just what they needed to say based on the responses of the health care provider they were speaking with. They never saw or needed to filter through unnecessary parts of the script. This made the eLearning course itself a reference piece that was used on every single outbound call made post-training.
Instructor-led Workshop:
The instructor-led workshop was held virtually. I began the session with a debrief, covering any questions agents had coming out of the eLearning. Then, we went through a few practice scenarios as a large group. I had pre-written scenarios to ensure we got through all the different ways we anticipated these conversations could go. I created over a dozen test accounts in the training environment of the CRM. I had the agent on the hotspot share their screen with the CRM and script up while I played the role of the health care provider they were calling. They used the interactive script I created along with the training environment of the CRM and practiced making the outbound calls. Once we did a few as a large group, I broke us up into breakout rooms with two agents per room. In each room agents took turns playing the role of the health care provider and the rep with the active rep being the screen-sharer. I popped into each room on a rotating basis to check on progress and answer questions. At the end we came back together for another debrief.
