Carolyn Blunt, Founder of Real Results Training wrote an article a few months back that has some great ideas for building a successful call centre training program. Her ideas are not just relevant to call centres, but can be applied across most types of training program. I went through an picked out 3 ideas that I really liked and felt were important:

1. Learning Styles – survey your trainees to find out how they learn best
   ‘We all favour learning in one or two of four different ways or ‘learning styles’ (Honey & Mumford 1992): Activist[..] Pragmatist[..] Theorist[..] and Reflector[..].Training should therefore be well designed in order to account for all these preferences. Unless you put all trainees through a learning styles questionnaire there is no way of knowing what mix of styles are in any one training group; so it is best practice to allow for all four.
2. Media Rich Content – appeal to more than one of the senses
   ‘Confucius is reputed to have said: “Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand.” This underpins the theory of ‘Accelerated Learning’ which is the idea that when we engage both hemispheres of our neo-cortex (or frontal brain) we can take in more information. The left hemisphere is known to favour logic and language while the right favours colour and imagery. By appealing to all the senses we can ‘speed up’ or accelerate the learning process and help information to be pushed into long-term memory.’
3. Fresh and Relevant Courses – update information regularly
   ‘If something is not working in a training course, change it! Training modules should not be left alone simply because no one has complained. Keep adapting them to keep them fresh for both the delegates and for the trainer who is delivering. At least once a year the training module should have a complete review.’

Click here for the complete article How to design a call centre training programme

@Schnicker