T-Online: Bringing Learning Online for Call Center Workers

The call center is one of the most important points of contact between a company and its customers. Ineffective call center operations can affect customer retention and loyalty, not to mention an organization’s ability to fulfill whatever need that prompted the customer to call in the first place.

Further, call centers must continually execute need fulfillment in a way that leaves the customer satisfied with the experience and willing to continue patronizing the organization. Ineffective call center-agent training can jeopardize all that.

Internet provider T-Online, part of Deutsche Telekom, offers about 14 million European customers online content and media services – nearly 200 different products – and call center operations are an integral part of its business. Recently, T-Online chose to implement simulation-based e-learning in order to flesh out its product and systems training, using Kaplan IT Learning’s STT Trainer software.

“We figured out that there is something missing, and that something is the know-how,” said Bernd Wiest, e-learning manager, T-Online. “Our regular modules are quick in development, but they only tell people the why and the what: Why am I doing this training? Why am I learning this product, and what does it consist of? What can I do with it? Things like that. STT calls this type of training ‘page-turner training.’ The real, simulation-exercise part of the training was missing, and this was something we added last year.”

T-Online has about 4,000 call center agents to train, and it has found success with a blended learning approach that incorporates classroom and e-learning components, complete with exams.

Most training is technical IT product- or systems-related and must be available at any time because T-Online offers customer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“The idea behind the whole training was to provide as quick as possible and as cheap and standardized as possible a training for everybody who is on the customer care lines,” Wiest said. “One of the good results is, not only that we save around 30 percent of our training time now, the activity is still the same. It’s as effective as the regular classroom training.