Deciding to implement a new contact center platform or a new application is just the beginning of your journey to successful operations, delivering customer experience excellence, and ongoing performance management. Whether you have a team of 10 or thousands of agents, our Global Education and Onboarding team is here to make the implementation process easy and seamless for every contact center role that is impacted. We work hard to establish world-class customer loyalty because our customers trust us to help them build relationships that last.
For this article, we went behind the scenes with Joe Johnson, Manager of Global Education and Onboarding for NICE CXone. He provides an inside look at his role, what his team does, the customer training they provide, and the resources available to our customers. Joe’s team understands the detailed planning and process our customers go through to implement CXone as smoothly and seamlessly as possible. They are involved from the beginning of implementation planning through onboarding and go-live
Meet Joe Johnson, Manager of Global Education and Onboarding
Joe Johnson has been in a training role with NICE for nine years. He loves what he does and his role because, “To be a trainer you really have to understand how to get through to people, how to adjust the way you think or the way you explain something to align it with the ideas or thoughts that are going through your audience's mind.” His previous work experience in contact centers in both the financial and entertainment industries has helped him understand our customers, recognize the different environments that they work in, and tailor the training for every team depending on what role they are in.
The three words that Joe uses to describe himself that make him successful in his role are, strategist, juggler, and advocate. He leads a team of educators that create and drive the training strategies for all our customers. Meeting daily with stakeholders and customers is a priority to make sure his team is providing the best-in-class education services. He advocates for early engagement in the implementation process for his team, working to provide a roadmap to the best educational experience for each customer.
Training to meet our customer’s needs
For Joe Johnson, making connections and building relationships through training isn’t just his everyday job, it’s his passion. His 10-year-old daughter, Sophi, and 13-year-old son, Dax, are his greatest achievements and have inspired the way he connects with his team and training attendees. A few years ago, at his son’s elementary school, Joe and his wife were attending an awards ceremony. They sat down waiting for the ceremony to begin when a cafeteria worker walked over and asked if they were Dax’s parents. He said yes, and the cafeteria worker proceeded to tell them that every day their son makes it a point to go into the kitchen to say hello and ask both workers how their day is going before he eats his lunch. Joe thought what a neat thing, especially considering his son is very shy, but still understands the importance of making people feel a part of something and building relationships.
Today, Joe emulates the same concept in the Education organization when working with larger groups, one challenge is teaching a universal curriculum to five or more individuals with five or more different mindsets. The importance of getting to know somebody, understanding their role and background is key to making a new idea or thought click. Joe has even asked attendees about their hobbies so that he can relate a concept back to something they enjoy and are passionate about.
Every customer’s training needs are different. Joe and his team are adept at working with different contact center environments, young and veteran professionals, different learning styles, and the various CXone components being implemented. The key to meeting every customer’s needs is simply, listening to them.
<h2Onboarding and Training New Customers </h2Call centers look into new technology solutions because they want to address limitations with their current solution, consolidate different teams and technology, or improve the customer experience. Whatever the company’s goals or initiatives are, we understand that our customers have a lot invested and they are very passionate about achieving success. We focus on tailoring our training and content, to support the customer’s goals, initiatives, and challenges.
After we have successfully implemented the CXone platform and its tools, our customers continue to work with an account manager that is there to provide more resources and support. Our instructional designers also provided a suite of interactive, self-paced training content in the NICE Dojo for continuing education, and to help answer future questions that may arise along the way.
The goal when onboarding a customer
Change can be scary, and every customer is different and has different challenges they need addressed. The education team focuses, not only on showing the customer and its contact center agents how to do their jobs within the CXone platform, but also to provide the why. Focusing on the success criteria that the customer has set out to achieve is what makes our onboarding and training strategy different from a standard training organization. Our Education and Onboarding team wants to be as consultative as possible and to help the customer understand “what’s in it for me.”
Recent improvements to better serve our customers
“The biggest improvement that I am most proud of is the rebrand and refocus of our education team from being trainers to being consultants,” says Joe. “Every opportunity to interact and engage with our customers is important because they are not only getting answers to questions they have now, but the team is also thinking about what questions they will have in the future.”
As soon as the trainer or onboarding manager is brought into the implementation process to engage with a new customer, they start building the relationship. They begin by asking questions to understand the customer’s needs, and then collaborate with the customer to develop business use cases to be applied in training.
New onboarding training feature
Our product portfolio is always being updated with the latest features and new products. So, we continually update our training experience and content so that customers have the latest and greatest. Joe informed us of an exciting new feature that was recently implemented with the onboarding packages. We now have core product functionality training built-in, instead of requiring individual classes led by a training facilitator for each component of the CXone platform.
This recent change allows for the onboarding manager to provide a much more contextual training, tailored to meet the customer’s goals, show the customers how they can be more efficient as a contact center, teach them how to pull better data, and expand to certain groups. The key that drives the success of the training is that the onboarding manager can relay how the platform is going to hit the customer’s specific goals from of previous conversations that began since the implementation kick-off. While this new core training has only been in place for several months, it has been very beneficial to our customers according to post-training surveys and customer feedback.
Planning for the future
When the pandemic hit, our customers had to transition agents to work-from-home. Contact center agents had to be trained how to work in a new setting without a supervisor or leader to help them in person when they had a question. Things changed rapidly and so did the education and onboarding team. They went from being a traveling team that was on the road 2-3 weeks a month to work-from-home. All the processes, content, and activities that were used in a training classroom were built to succeed in a virtual environment.
Now with hybrid work models as contact center agents begin to return to the office, Joe and his team are continuing to create innovative NICE CXone education and training programs to simplify the process of learning to meet all our customer’s needs.
The success and satisfaction of our customers is our primary focus. The main feedback that the education and onboarding team receive post-training is regarding the positive relationship our customers build with the trainers and onboarding managers they work with. Read more about our customers and their success stories.
