Working in a call centre can be a challenging role. They are often busy, with a high level of focus on meeting deadlines and reaching set key performance indicators.
Whilst one of the best ways to learn more about working in a call centre is to actually do the job, there are plenty of courses and training that can be offered to those in the industry too.
Here at Learn Q, we are dedicated to providing businesses across a wealth of industries with what they need to have knowledgeable colleagues that are able to do their roles to the best of their ability.
This is why Learn Q offers a wide selection of training courses. When it comes to call centre training, there are some courses that are legal requirements and therefore mandatory to complete, training that is strongly recommended and training that is recommended. These will all help colleagues to stay compliant, keeping your business, customers and themselves safe and also offer the best service that they can.
Let’s take a further look at these to see why the courses are going to be important for you to offer your colleagues throughout your call centre.
As we have already mentioned, there are some courses that are deemed to be a legal requirement and that you have to ensure that all your colleagues have training in. For many, this training will form a part of their onboarding process for new colleagues, which means that you have given them the required training before they even start their role.
The training that is offered within a call centre can be broken down into different sections that explain where the training fits within your business.
Please note that there may be additional specialist, mandatory courses that you need to complete in order for your business to be compliant. Please make sure that you do additional research so that you are always aware of what these are.
Business Compliance Courses
Working within a call centre means that you are going to be dealing with clients and customers from around the world. You are going to sometimes hold personal data about those contacts and clients, and you are going to be communicating with them on a regular basis too.
This means that it is important to know how to manage the data that you hold and also how to protect your business from any threats that it may face.
The three main business compliance courses that we offer are:
Financial crime is always a risk when you are a business that handles large amounts of money. This is something that can happen within a call centre. Whilst most of the time, this type of large money client will be found higher up in the business, there is always a chance that every employee will have dealings with them, and therefore, offering them all anti-money laundering training is key.
This training helps colleagues to be aware of the anti-money laundering regulations and laws. Having this knowledge can help them to protect the overall business from both financial losses caused by money laundering, as well as any legalities that they may face too.
Bribery can and does happen in businesses of all sizes, and it can be any employee who is a target of someone who wants to commit this crime. The best way to protect every colleague and your overall business is to ensure that everyone has Bribery Act Awareness training.
This training looks at the UK Bribery Act of 2010 and how it helps to keep businesses safe.
GDPR is something that has become very well known in businesses of late and everyone who handles customer data, in some way, needs to follow the regulation. Not only can mishandling data cause your customers to lose faith in what you do for them, but it also can end up with your business being given a large penalty to pay.
Ensuring that your colleagues have at least an overview of GDPR and how it works is a great way to ensure this happens.
Another type of training course that is often mandatory within a business is health and safety. Health and safety training is there to ensure that everyone in the business, be they colleagues or customers, is protected and kept safe.
It comes in a variety of types. However, the most common health and safety courses that are offered are:
When you work in a call centre, you are going to be spending a large amount of your time working at a computer. This means that Display Screen Equipment Awareness Training is incredibly important to make sure that you have.
This is even more, the case when you think that a third of all work-related injuries are caused by sitting in front of a computer in the wrong position. Knowing that you can protect yourself and your colleagues from a variety of musculoskeletal injuries simply by knowing the right way to set up your working space means that it makes sense that DSE is mandatory training that you should provide.
We all hope that we won’t ever have to deal with a fire in our workplace, especially when you work in a call centre and have a large number of colleagues that need to be kept safe. However, this can and does happen from time to time.
Having fire safety training means that every single employee knows not only what to do in the case of a fire but also what to do in order to prevent it from happening. Fire safety training also highlights the impact that a fire can have and educate on why training is so important.
Health and safety is always one of those subjects that seems to attract eye rolls. However, it is something that is vitally important that every single employee has some awareness of. Whilst you will have colleagues who are responsible for larger aspects of health and safety in your business, you need to ensure that every single employee understands the part that they have to play in keeping everyone around them as safe as possible.
Strongly Recommended Courses
Along with the courses that are a legal requirement to have in your business, there are also courses that we strongly recommend that you have. They are not something that is mandatory, but they can hugely help your business to run smoothly and to ensure that you meet the requirements of keeping everyone safe too.
Not only this, but many of the courses that we strongly recommend offer development to your colleagues too, which means that they can move forward with their own career progression too.
Again, some of them fit into health and safety, some into business compliance and some into softer skills.
Health and Safety
Health and Safety Risk Assessment Awareness
Along with the health and safety training that is mandatory within your business, there is also a training course that is dedicated to the risk assessment side. Whilst there will be specific people who carry out detailed risk assessments within your business, it is always good for every colleague member to be aware of the main risks associated with working in a call centre and how they can be avoided.
Injuries can happen in any business type, even if you are someone who spends a lot of your time sitting down at a desk. Knowing what to do when a major injury or incident happens is vital, which is why we strongly recommend that you offer the RIDDOR Awareness training course.
RIDDOR stands for Reporting Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations and is something that everyone should be aware of.
Whilst most safeguarding is going to relate to working with children, there can also be safeguarding concerns when it comes to vulnerable adults too. Working within a call centre may mean that you come across these people, and therefore knowing how you can help them and the support that you can give is hugely important.
Business Compliance
One of the most important skills that we all need to learn is how we can be tolerant of those around us and also work and live in a way that is as equal as possible. Whilst this should be something that you should just know how to do, it is always worthwhile ensuring that this skill is worked on, and you can provide Equality and Diversity training for this purpose.
We all hope that workplace harassment is not something that we need to worry about, but it can and does happen. Even in the best of businesses, there can be circumstances and situations that could be deemed as workplace harassment. One of the best tools that you can give your colleagues is a way to identify what workplace harassment is and also what they can then do to report it.
The Consumer Rights Act of 2015 is the current legal framework to cover the purchase of goods, content or services. This is what protects customers and makes sure that businesses do what they say they are going to do. Mis-selling consumers, or not providing them with what they have purchased can really have an impact on your business as a whole and it is important that every single colleague within your business understands the rights that every consumer has.
Soft skill is a skill, expertise or knowledge that is not deemed to be essential for everyday work. That said, it is a skill that can make a colleague’s working life much easier and more productive. As well as this, soft skills can also be there to improve the experience that your customers and clients have when they use your business and work towards a professional brand that you can be proud of.
Here are some of our strongly recommended soft skills courses.
Technology brings a variety of great things to our lives and to the way that we work. But, as well as this, it also can make it tricky to protect ourselves from criminals. Being aware of what we can all do as colleagues to ensure that the business that we work within is as safe as possible is where Cyber Security Awareness can really make a difference.
When you work in a call centre, you are going to be used to the fact that complaints can happen. Knowing how best to approach dealing with them is often half the battle won. This is why we recommend offering this Complaints Handling course to your colleagues, giving them the skills that they need to enable them to deal with even the hardest complaints that come in.
A huge part of working in a call centre is speaking to customers about a variety of things. Customer service skills do often come naturally to people, but equally, these are skills that can be taught and learned over time. With this Customer Service Skills course, colleagues can understand what the customer service journey is and the part that they play in making it successful.
It goes without saying that within a call centre, taking calls is going to be a large part of the task list for the day. Knowing how to effectively manage those calls and be able to resolve them as quickly as possible, without impacting the level of service that you provide, is an important part of the process and being able to do the call centre role well too.
Recommended Courses
Courses don’t always have to be offered just because they are mandatory or something that your business has to have. Sometimes, it is a good idea to provide your colleagues with courses that can be beneficial to them and to your overall business.
We have a wide variety of courses on offer here at Learn Q, which we can recommend for you to provide to colleagues throughout your business.
As you work in a call centre, you are going to need to be able to provide the very best in customer service. This is why we are proud to be able to offer a variety of courses that are all linked to providing a high level of customer service to every single customer.
We all need to negotiate from time to time, be that in order to make a sale or to simply turn an unhappy customer round into a happy one. This is why the Negotiation Process course is provided to cover the different stages of the negotiation process.
To go along with the Negotiation Process course, there is also the Negotiation Skills course which looks more in-depth at the skills that are needed to enable positive negotiations every single day in business and in customer service.
Whilst not every single customer service role is going to include an aspect of sales; there are plenty of call centre roles that do require you to make some form of additional sale in order for the call to be a success. Having the basic skills that allow you to be comfortable interacting with customers and make these sales is a great step in the right direction.
Soft Skills
Being able to manage the time that we have in our daily working lives is often one of the hardest things to do. Having the right knowledge on how to manage time and get those to-do tasks ticked off can really help. This course can be offered to your colleagues as an additional training course to help them each and every day.
Whether you are someone who is leading a meeting, or you are planning meetings that other colleagues attend, you are going to want to make sure that your meetings meet their desired outcome and that it is as efficient as possible. This training course is able to help to ensure that meetings are planned well and that they run as well as they can too.
Being a manager is one of the trickier roles that you can take within a call centre. Not only are you often the manager of a number of people, but you are also responsible for managing their workload and their task lists.
Being able to provide your colleagues with the relevant leadership courses can really help them to be successful managers and to help to lead their teams successfully.
One of the key aspects of being a manager is managing the people within the team. However, this can also be one of the hardest parts to get right. Whilst you can learn how to manage people on the job, this training course can give you the basics that you will then be able to use with your colleagues.
Many managers are going to need to be able to present within their working role. This could be a presentation to their team, to the wider department or perhaps even to clients or prospective customers. It can be a scary thing to do, but having the right knowledge can really help presentations run as smoothly as possible.
It is not always easy to appraise members of your team and know what to say when it comes to reviewing their performance. This training course helps managers to provide their colleagues with appraisals that not only look at the key areas that they are performing well in but also discuss ways that they can improve their performance and any development that they need for their role.
Conflicts are part and parcel of working in a call centre or any other business for that matter. Whilst they are inevitable, they are not always pleasant, and they can have a wider-reaching impact on colleagues across the business. As a manager, you are going to need to know how to effectively manage any conflicts and offer protection to the well-being and safety of all colleagues.
Business Compliance
Every single business needs to have an equal opportunities policy, which means that those who have disabilities are able to access the opportunities that everyone else can. This training course can help to show colleagues how they can be aware of how to be as inclusive as possible to those who have disabilities.
Everyone is prone to make judgements based on what they have seen and experienced in their own lives. Whilst this may seem like a normal thing to do, it can actually negatively impact both our personal and professional lives. This training is designed to help colleagues to be able to recognise their own unconscious biases and how they can then overcome them in order to make fair decisions.
If you ever have to recruit for a role in a business, then you will already know that recruitment is not the easiest thing to do. Interviewing potential candidates can be tricky to do, and you want to ensure that your interviews are not only effective but that they are fair too. This course helps you to learn more about how an interview works and how you can make sure that they work as it should.
Whilst we all need to take control of our own mental health, when it comes to the workplace, managers need to be able to help their colleagues and promote a positive workplace. This Mental Health Workplace course ensures that you can manage your own mental health and stress, as well as provide you with advice on how you can help those around you too.
The answer to the question of how often the courses should be repeated is not always as straightforward as you may hope and there is not necessarily a set answer across all organisations. For many courses it will really depend on the type of course that is being taken and the nature of what you do. Ideally, the refresh regularity should be based on a thorough risk assessment of your business and tailored to the unique needs of your organisation and customers.
That said, if you are looking for a general rule, then we would say every 12 months is good practice for most of the courses that we offer:
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