In my Contact Center(@ 900 employees), I not only am the Training Manager, but I also manager the Quality Assurance monitors.
When trends are identified via the QA's, we can address them in training in a timely manner.
This also ties in to writing the Customer Service definitions/Call Guide and training specifically to that.
Can anyone share their QA definitions/evaluation criteria for ensuring a great customer experience? How does training impact this piece for you?

I'd be happy to share what I've learned in about a dozen big call centers. It's more than I can write here. Email me at RSTEV@aol.com or call me at Steve Rosenbaum 952-368-9329

In a former life, when I was involved with training and coaching new call center reps, we closely observed the variations from how people did in training and their OJT time (taking live calls but with us there to observe and give immediate feedback) to how they did once on the floor. It's not that people don't know what to do, its that they don't always have the support, guidance, tools, etc to do it.

In other words -- there were people who did great in OJT with customer service, but things went downhill once they were out on the floor with their real managers, other coworkers, increased call volume, etc. (see what I'm saying?... closing the gap was not a training issue...well...at least not for the call center rep)

Sounds like the real issue is the supervisor and the co-workers.

Nero

At least, nero. In a call center, there are loads of factors -- call volume, weird hours, coaching support, noise, appropriate business tools, supervision, coworkers who don't undermine newly learned stuff with things like "that's not how WE learned it back in the day..." and so on...