Most companies offer lousy service because they don’t train their employees. However, companies that train their workers too much up front may find that their investment goes out the door. Call center workers typically work in a very high stress environment and quit their job within months. According to studies I have read, to get to the top of a company’s food chain, you need to stick to your job for at least fifteen years. How high will you rise in management if you promptly quit every three months?
How much up front training should you give a BPO worker? Or is it better to test people, and make them pay for their own training if they want a chance to work for you? Better yet, maybe the best way to train an employee is a few hours a month on an ongoing course. Perhaps there would be fewer hours of training and more hours of working after an employee has proven themselves over the course of time.
If you put too much training in an employee up front, you lose it when they quit. If you don’t train your employees at all, you lose your customers as they will seek companies with employees that have more than half a brain. There must be a happy medium.
One method is to divide tasks by difficulty. A new employee should only be allowed to do simpler or less critical tasks for the first few months. After they have proven their loyalty, that is when you might train them to do more difficult tasks. On the other hand, what if they are good at simple tasks, but can’t learn well? If you started out by training them in the beginning, you would have data on their learning curve which is a very critical stat to have on an employee.
Maybe the training curve should include some up-front training to establish the employee’s learning curve, but heavy duty training should be left for after the employee has stuck around for 120 days.
The cost of losing an employee seems high as you might lose your clients if you keep offering new employees of questionable abilities. It might make sense to invest in the office experience so that people stick around a lot longer. But, that is another story.
When and how you do your training and how much are critical questions to ask. You should ideally experiment on this concept in as many ways as you can think of.