The primary focus of our business is education. Customers of The Call Center School can choose from our library of standard courses or we can custom-develop a class to meet your center's unique needs.

Frontline Fundamentals
Core Program

The five-part Frontline Fundamentals series includes the following topics:

• The Power of One: The Difference One Agent Can Make
• Vocal Makeover: Techniques for a Winning Voice
• First Class Phone Manners: The Absolute Musts of Telephone Best Practices
• Power Phrasing: Winning Word Choices for Effective Communication
• Tyrant Turnaround: Going from Difficult to Delighted Callers

Frontline Electives

• Email Essentials: Frontline Guide for Writing Effective Emails
• Collections Calling: Steps and Strategies for Telephone Collections
• The Art of Upselling: Tips for Making the Sale

Call Center Supervision
The ten-part Call Center Supervision series includes the following topics:

• Making the Match: Recruiting and Hiring Call Center Staff
• Finders Keepers: Proven Strategies for Staff Retention
• Setting the Standards: Defining Peformance Goals and Objectives
• Don't Know, Can't, Won't Model: Diagnosing and Treating Performance Problems
• Fundamentals of Coaching: Techniques for Shaping Employee Performance
• Motivation Marvels: 100 Ways to Improve Motivation and Morale
• Teamwork Template: Techniques for Building and Managing Teams
• Key Performance Indicators: Managing and Reporting the Numbers
• Introduction to Workforce Management: What All Call Center Staff Need to Know
• Introduction to Call Center Technologies: A Beginner's Guide

Call Center Operations
The five-part Call Center Operations series includes the following topics:

• Introduction to Workforce Management: What All Call Center Staff Need to Know
• Key Performance Indicators: Managing and Reporting the Numbers
• Introduction to Call Center Technologies: A Beginner's Guide
• Business Process Improvement: Six Sigma and Beyond
• Analytics and Reporting: Developing a Call Center Communications Plan

• FMLA and the Call Center
• Measuring Forecast Accuracy
• Ten Common Mistakes in Handling Email Contacts
• The Math of Call Center Staffing – Understanding Critical Trade-offs
• Performing a Call Center Consolidation Analysis
• ABCs of Staffing for Outbound Telephone Calls
• Calculating Crucial Turnover Metrics

Leadership/Business
Core Program

The five-part Leadership/Business Management series includes the following topics:

• A Winning Vision: Strategic Planning for Call Center Leaders
• Dollars and Sense: Basics of Finance for Call Center Professionals
• Voice of the Customer: Developing a Systematic Listening/Feedback System
• Making the Case: Building a Better Business Case for Acquisition Of Call Center Technologies and Services
• Creating a Sales Culture: Optimizing Sales Performance in the Call Center

Special Topics

• Blueprint for Success: Charting a Course for Personnel Development

Workforce Management
The Workforce Management series includes the following topics:

Core Program

• Data Collection and Analysis: Getting Off to the Right Start
• Forecasting Fundamentals: Proven Practices for Predicting Call Workload
• Calculating Call Center Staff: The Math of Call Center Staffing Tradeoffs
• Scheduling Principles and Problems: Solutions to Scheduling Challenges
• Managing Daily Service Levels: An Intra-Day Guide to Managing Staff and Service

• Advanced Forecasting Techniques: Fine-Tuning Workload Predictions
• Skill-Based Routing Complexities: Traditional and Multi-Channel
• Performing a Workforce Management Audit
• Attendance and Adherence: Getting and Keeping Bodies in Seats

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Quality Assurance
The five-part Quality Assurance series includes the following topics:

• Building a Quality Form: Designs for Performance Excellence
• Calibration Corner: Best Practices in Calibration and Scoring
• Fundamentals of Coaching: Techniques for Shaping Employee Performance
• Making the Most of QM Systems: Optimizing Monitoring and Recording Technology >
• Satisfaction Guaranteed: Performing a Call Center Satisfaction Audit

Call Center Technical
The Call Center Technical series includes the following topics:

• Making the Most of ACD: Understanding Routing and Reporting Capabilities
• Making the Most of IVR: Design, Scripting, and Creative Uses of IVR
• Speech Technologies in Today's Call Center
• Traffic Engineering: Mathematical Modeling for Call Center Resources

Survey Workshop
Contact centers frequently choose surveying as the method to collect information from customers or employees. Collecting good, reliable survey information requires that you have a properly designed survey instrument so that every respondent interprets each question the same way and that you have a sufficient sample of respondents for the results to truly represent the overall group.

This series of Survey Workshop Webinars, hosted by The Call Center School and taught by industry expert Fred Van Bennekom, teaches you step-by-step how to build and create a survey program to achieve your contact center research goals. This six-part course curriculum covers the four phases of a survey project:

• Survey Project Management
• Survey Questionnaire Design (3 seminars)
• Survey Administration
• Survey Data Analysis

This series of workshops will teach you how to create a good survey questionnaire design. Class content will contain, but not be limited to:

• Plan an effective survey project
• Identify what questions to ask on the survey questionnaire
• Write good survey questions and avoiding common design mistakes
• Design survey scales, including popular likert scales
• Avoid introducing bias into the survey results
• Increase response rates
• Find the message buried in the survey data set

Frederick C. Van Bennekom, Dr.B.A., Biography

Fred Van Bennekom founded Great Brook to help organizations increase their effectiveness by capturing and applying feedback, especially customer feedback. Dr. Fred delivers workshops teaching survey research practices based on his book Customer Surveying: A Guidebook for Service Manager. Through Great Brook’s Survey Mentor Suite, Fred provides hands-on mentorship to people to develop better survey programs and questionnaires, and he conducts audits of feedback processes.

Fred also helps customer support groups voice customer needs into product development processes to yield higher quality products at lower Total Cost of Ownership. With Dr. Keith Goffin of Cranfield Management School, Fred co-authored a major research report on Problem Prevention Through Design for Supportability: Gaining Competitive Advantage from Customer Support.

Additionally, Fred teaches operations management in Northeastern University’s Executive MBA and at Babson College. He has also taught at Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. He received his A.B. from Bowdoin College and his masters and doctoral degrees from Boston University's School of Management.

Prior to his consulting and academic careers, Fred served for a decade as an information systems consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation's Customer Service organization, developing operational reporting systems for field service management. Fred has published in both industry and academic journals and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences worldwide.
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