Training in a call center is never what it needs to be, but always seems to be “on the agenda for the near future”. Call centers make their money by having as many agents on the phones as much of the time as possible. Providing agents with adequate training means taking agents off the phones and putting them in a training room, which nobody in management wants. Much of the chaos in a call center stems from this lack of training or training done in a haphazard manner.
I once took a tech support job with a major IT firm assuming it would be operated as a well oiled machine, but found that it was more of the upheaval that I quit my previous job to escape. The employees were trained by different people in waves, so each training class got slightly different training. A few months later the project changed, requiring another round of “training” to use the term loosely, and my new trainer said that my previous trainer had definitely been wrong on many points. This creates a phenomenon I like to call the “ask three people, get four answers“ phenomenon. It’s hard to tell a coworker he is doing something wrong when he insists that’s what the trainer said to do.
An IT trainer once told a training class that I was in that he was going to teach us 1% of what we needed to know in order to do the job, and that the rest would come from doing it. Trial-and-error learning is always fun when your doing helpdesk work.
The moral to the story is when you call tech support and the agent sounds unsure, don’t take it out on the agent, he’s just trying to figure out which non functioning cubicle he will work at today and what his schedule is for the week since it has changed twice already and his manager resigned without notice ten minutes earlier
