Our QA & Training manager has to be strict about performance, but she does it with encouragement.
Liliana Ramirez jokingly refers to her staff as “the bad guys” at Callzilla. She’s our Quality Assurance and Training manager, the person responsible for making sure our agents do their jobs right, and taking action if anyone gets off track.
“But we are ‘bad guys’ in a good way,” she says. “It’s not only about, ‘Hey, you need to do this.’ It’s the coaching. We don’t just train the agents. As soon as they hit the floor we give them three weeks with a coach. Every day, just to make sure they are doing things right, that they are using all the information, that we are reinforcing what that clients want from us.”
Been there, done that
Ramirez knows the challenge that agents have to balance quality with productivity. She had to do it herself as an agent when she joined Callzilla four years ago. She had no experience as a customer service agent, and had to learn everything from scratch. She did it well. In less than a year we promoted her to supervisor. Another six month after that, she became a campaign manager. This year she took over Callzilla QA and Training.
“I really like this job,” she says. She’s in charge of trainers, five coaches, 15 QA analysts and two coordinators. They monitor calls and other platforms when agents interact with customers, measure the performance and make action plans to improve our call center metrics.
While they are strict about maintaining standards, they are constantly providing feedback to the agents in order to help them improve. The goal is not to merely follow the rules, but to get better at the work.
Always something new
New hires aren’t the only ones who need training. Each Callzilla client has a different product or service, and different requirements for how we represent them to the customer. So with each new campaign, even our tenured agents need to get up to speed. To get them there, Ramirez has to stay several steps ahead.
She’s had to become an expert on client retention, saves, win-backs, problem resolution, account management, subscription management, active listening, customer profiling, order generation, lead generation, tele-sales, appointment scheduling, and other areas.
With every training effort, we try to use call center gamification, especially through our PlayVox software tools. The whole idea is to borrow some aspects of games to make learning more fun. Agents can earn points and prizes while learning and improving performance.
“We learn better when we enjoy what we are learning,” Ramirez says.
Ramirez herself is a lifelong learner. She tries to read a couple of books a week, loves cooking, and loves to travel.
“Easter Island was kind of magical,” she says. “I would love to go back to Istanbul. And Amsterdam is one of my favorite places.”
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Related pages
- Callzilla Quality Assurance Program
- Callzilla Call Center Success Stories
- Recognition for our Nearshore Contact Center
Learn more
For more information on Callzilla’s experience, services, and pricing, please get in touch.
About the Author: Neal Topf
