4 Days

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The Workforce Management Boot Camp

A comprehensive, four-day workshop that integrates all aspects of workforce management to give work force management professionals the precise, start-to-finish skills that will improve accuracy, efficiency, increase employee and customer satisfaction, and consistently meet service levels.

ICMI's Workforce Management Boot Camp is an unparalleled opportunity to learn an integrated approach to call center workforce planning based on the realities that managers and analysts face every day. This workshop not only teaches you proven techniques to improve forecasting and scheduling, but allows you to practice those techniques with input from expert instructors. You and your colleagues will work through realistic exercises to solve common forecasting, staffing and, scheduling challenges. You will leave with a laptop full of true-to-life examples. Plus, you'll receive comprehensive course materials to reference for many years to come.

Through this boot camp, you'll supplement your on-the-job experience with formal call center training, learning how the best in the industry provide accurate forecasts and schedules that balance the needs of the organization and employees. You’ll focus on gaining a complete understanding of the theory and actually use and practice all the key functions of the WFM process. So bring your laptop and gain four days of hands-on experience improving forecasts, calculating staffing resources, and enhancing existing scheduling approaches.

*Please note: For this intensive hands-on workshop, an intermediate understanding of Excel is required (click here for Excel prerequisites). ICMI requires you bring a laptop to this workshop; before the course you will receive a URL and password via email to download software and course materials. It is necessary that you install this software prior to the course.

Laptop Requirements

• NT 4.0, 2000, XP or higher operating system
• Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007, 2010 or 2011 (with latest patches installed)
• 6 MB Free hard disk space
• USB enabled  

2 Days

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Business Acumen for Contact Center Leaders

This course focuses on the financial, influencing, negotiating, partnering, and communication skills that will further develop your business acumen so you can have a greater impact within and beyond the contact center.

As an experienced contact center leader, you see the need to identify the contact center’s value contributions and effectively communicate them throughout your organization. Further developing your business acumen can help you do this more effectively.

Business acumen is a set of skills and knowledge that give you new perspectives and the ability to see the big picture of the contact center and the entire organization. You can then use that picture to make better judgments and decisions. Mastering the skills involved in developing strong business cases for contact center initiatives will help you make an impact on your organization and move the contact center—and the organization—forward.

2 Days

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Contact Center Strategy

This 2 day executive-level planning workshop will provide the tools and direction necessary to develop, implement and manage a contact center strategy and leadership process.

Apply the lessons of the world’s best customer contact centers to transform your service and sales delivery systems to conquer new competitive challenges through ICMI’s Contact Center Strategy, an executive-level planning workshop. This two-day call center course will give you the information, tools and direction necessary to develop, implement and manage a contact center strategy and leadership process. You and your colleagues will work through realistic exercises to discuss key contact center challenges. You will leave with tools, techniques and strategies you can implement immediately and reference for many years to come.

This intensive and effective executive program is guaranteed to give you the direction needed to manage the changes in customer relationships driven by today’s multi-channel environment. You’ll become an even stronger leader with the capacity to effectively implement a contact center strategy that drives value and recognition.

2 Days

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Essential Skills and Knowledge for Effective Contact Center Management

The fundamental principles of contact center management that equip professionals to build exceptional operations and careers.

Advance the success of your call center and achieve your professional career goals with foundational training  in planning and managing an exceptional call center through ICMI's Essential Skills and Knowledge for Effective Contact Center Management course. This is ICMI's flagship course – the highest rated in the industry and attended by more key call center management personnel than any other contact center course available.

Evolving customer expectations, the rise of social media, proliferating contact channels and the heightened strategic role of customer services are changing contact centers dramatically. You'll learn how to apply the core principles of managing a contact center to these critical new environments.

This two-day course is an intensive and effective training program guaranteed to give key staff involved in resource planning, call center analysis, and performance reporting the tools necessary to make real, lasting, bottom-line financial impact.

You and your management staff will learn what thousands of other call center professionals have learned through this course: Practical, proven strategies for creating a planning culture that you can apply right away to see an immediate return on investment in your call center.

2 Days

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Monitoring and Coaching

Design a comprehensive, cost-effective monitoring and coaching program that boosts quality, drives performance improvement initiatives, and increases agent performance and commitment.

Your call center agent is the critical link between your customers and your products and services. Through ICMI's Monitoring and Coaching two-day contact center course, you'll discover how to bring out the best in every agent and deliver exceptional experiences to your customers.

You'll start right from the beginning defining what it takes to create a performance culture in your organization. You'll examine the costly threat of agent turnover and how you can prevent it by using monitoring and coaching to create lasting motivation and engagement.

Using case studies of real companies, as well as hypothetical practice company exercises, you'll receive training on how to use your organization's mission statement to guide you in developing performance standards. You'll work through defining the purpose and objectives of your program, as well as determining roles and responsibilities. Using numerous examples and exercises, you'll decide which of your performance standards are "foundation standards" and which are "finesse standards", and how to monitor for each. You'll review sample performance standards before learning the elements that show you how to define and document your own performance standards.

Having determined your performance standards, you'll move on to the monitoring process: Why do we monitor? Who should monitor? How often? What should you be monitoring for? To answer these questions, you'll have the opportunity to discuss the answers to these questions with your fellow participants as well as review the results of several ICMI community member surveys in order gain insight about what peers are doing. Armed with this information, along with sample forms and exercises, you'll develop your own monitoring form that meets your unique situation.

Finally you'll explore the ways to use the data you gather from monitoring to make lasting improvements in your contact center through coaching. You'll review the six basic principles of coaching and the SAFE coaching model. You'll also role play and practice your coaching skills, so you learn by doing. Whether you're starting from scratch or fine-tuning an existing program, this call center course offers the tools and the know-how you need to design an approach that's tailored to your budget, your culture, and your business objectives

2 Days

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More than Metrics

Managing a contact center can be difficult when you find yourself wading through an endless sea of data and performance measures.

We’ll take an introductory look at the key metrics we should focus on as contact centers. This will include a breakdown of metric accountability by level (identifying which metrics the agent’s impact, managers, directors, etc.), and how to best communicate results and performance to each respective group.

This course will answer a number of questions including: How do you explain the contact center’s performance to your executive and have it be meaningful? How do you explain to an agent that metrics are more than just a number?

Lastly, we’ll discuss emerging channels and the impact of social media and mobile on the contact center. This course will help to identify best practices, system capabilities, and key considerations for best serving customers in these new ways.

2 Days

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Trainer Development Workshop

This 2 day course will help experienced and new trainers uncover attitudes, techniques, and tools that make training more effective and that will develop their training skills and refresh their abilities.

Contact Centers often use supervisors or subject-matter experts in the training role. This allows them to bring their wealth of experience into developing others, but effective training is a skill that includes more than just knowing the material and being able to speak to groups. Participants in this course will leave with a solid understanding of what makes for good training, the basic principles of how adults learn (which is different from how youths learn), a simple design model for when they need to create the training or make modifications to existing training, the best practices for delivering training, techniques to engage participants to help the learning last, evaluating the effectiveness of training, managing the classroom, and aiding the transfer from learning to performance. Additionally, they will have a whole new host of training activities and trainer tips and tricks that they can immediately use to make their training more effective.

This lively course provides practical and effective techniques that will improve the effectiveness of your training, helping trainees transfer new skills and knowledge to improve job performance. Participants will come away with many activities that can be easily incorporated into their own training to make it more effective. The course is active and hands-on, with many opportunities for practicing new skills and techniques.