Séntrel - skills management is a new software system that enables effective management of skills within the contact centre by creating a Skills Management Infrastructure (SMI).

Skills management is a new approach to managing capabilities that enables training and recruitment activities to be integrated with the various processes and technologies that exist within the contact centre to develop, assess and deploy personnel:

Assessment - provides a schedule of the skills held and degree of competence for each agent by using qualitative self / manager assessments and quantitative confirmation from quality monitoring, agent analytics, tests, eLearning assessment and other systems.

Development - provides skills frameworks, aligned to business needs, to direct training and development activities such as eLearning, mentoring and classroom training to fill skills gaps identified by assessments or resource-skill requirement forecasts. Skills frameworks can also help in the recruitment assessment process to identify training needs and select the best candidates.

Deployment - provides an up to the minute schedule of agent skills, detailing both the skill type and degree of competence, for use with contact management, skills routing and workforce management platforms.

At the heart of the Séntrel solution is a dynamic skills asset repository that records all of the abilities that exist within an organisation. Beyond this, Séntrel can also help contact centres develop the right skills for both their current and future business needs by deploying standardised pathways for individual development, such as eSkills UK's Call2Contact framework, and adding skill objectives and training plans to fulfil business goals.

• holds skills and competency records for every individual within a contact centre. These can be viewed at individual, team, location or enterprise levels.
• allows skill objectives, aligned to business and individual needs, to be set for every employee within an organisation. These objectives can be part of a standardised framework or be developed by an organisation to meet specific business goals.
• produces skill-agent lists for use with skills based routing or workforce management systems.
• allows modelling and manipulation of an organisation's skills-resource hierarchy to assist in resource planning, restructuring succession planning and risk mitigation.
• competency levels can be driven by Quality Monitoring systems to provide real world competency confirmation.
• provides detailed training plans to achieve skills and competencies, making the skill acquisition process more efficient and effective. Training plans can link to eLearning applications or be associated with soft skills training.
• produces skill profiles for all defined roles within the operation to assist with recruitment.

• better workforce utilisation - accurate skill-agent profiles enable skills routing and workforce management systems to use your agents in the most effective and efficient manner. Minimising staff costs and improving performance.
• better resource optimisation - optimise your resources by determining the types and volumes of skills required to drive current and future business objectives.
• better training - align development precisely with operational requirements and business objectives. Avoiding unnecessary costs of over skilling and preventing operational performance impact caused by under skilling.
• better skill utilisation - prevents skill latency, uncovering all the skills within your organisation and making these visible and available for use.
• better staff retention - agents are costly to train and expensive to acquire. Séntrel creates training and development frameworks for every person within the contact centre improving morale and job satisfaction by giving clear skills paths and better training for career progression.
• better compliance - for sectors, such as financial services, where specific training has to be given for compliance reasons, management of this ongoing process can be time consuming and ineffective. Séntrel makes it simple to monitor which agents have received what training, making sure that compliance is maintained at all times.
• better risk management and succession planning - over reliance on single individuals to provide essential skills can be a real threat to an organisation. Séntrel makes it easy for enterprises to see whether adequate cover for specific skill types exists and plan for the acquisition of these so that any risk can be mitigated in advance.
• better recruitment - the cost of recruitment can be high and the cost of recruiting the wrong person can be even higher. Séntrel produces a complete skills profile for every role within the contact centre to make sure that the person with the right skill capabilities is employed.

• better personal development - every member of the contact centre will have a clear training and development record and plan for the future so they can see what skills they currently have and what they will need to achieve to progress.
• better career progression - Séntrel makes sure that the skills and capabilities of individuals are fully and immediately recognised so career progression is a matter of merit not chance.
• more job satisfaction - knowing detailed individual capabilities makes sure that staff and agents are only asked to carry out tasks and take calls that they are adequately trained to deal with.
• better motivation - the acquisition of skills through training and development has a direct effect on individual motivation. Competency can also be linked to pay to provide further incentives for the overall performance management process.

• better level of service - accurate skills enable workforce management systems to use resources to best advantage and make it easy for organisations to see areas of under skilling that effect service levels or customer satisfaction.
• better satisfaction - skills based routing technologies such as ACDs and intelligent routers can use the accurate agent-skill information so customers can be put through to agents with the right skills to deal with their enquiries.