Several top leaders from Knowlagent recently participated in discussions about the ever-growing issues of call center agent productivity and shrinkage at four major industry conferences. Knowlagent President and CEO, Matt McConnell, shared his views on developing a successful remote agent deployment process at the Remote Agent Summit.

McConnell explicitly addressed virtual learning best practices, prioritizing communications and increasing productivity by reducing shrinkage. Knowlagent’s Vice President of Sales, Kevin Kiernan, spoke on the amount and make-up of shrinkage in the call center at an American Teleservices Association Convention roundtable.

Kiernan addressed delving into controllable activities, such as training, communications and coaching for agents and shared the results from a recent benchmarking study on the topic.

John Wolf, the Chief Operations Officer participated in a roundtable discussion and focused the on methods for increasing call center productivity, including technology that makes use of agent wait time for off-phone activities. Wolf spoke at the International Customer Management Institute Executive Summit.

Executive Director of Strategic Accounts, Derek Lanham, addressed building new skills and managing cultural change among the agent workforce to ensure success when moving to multi-channel customer service, at the Multi-Channel Virtual Conference.

Lanham also recommended falling back on best practices such as varied delivery and repetition in addition to utilizing automation to manage complexities created in this new environment.

In May of this year, the Knowlagent team will partner with Customer Contact Strategies to kick off a four-city workshop series entitled “At-Home Strategies for Success.”

The series will cover topics such as at-home cost reductions, building an effective operations plan and opportunities for virtual training and e-learning. The workshop will be held in Baltimore from May 3-4, 2011.