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Online Community For a Call Center?
kirkmacdonald writes "I work as an analyst in a small call center. There are about 200 on phone agents, but half of them work from home. About a month ago I submitted a Project Charter to create an online Community for the agents. The basic premise was something approaching the combination of a wiki application and a standard forum (phpbb and the like). We already have an online knowledge base for company policies, training and system documentation. This community environment would be intended to simulate being able to talk shop with the person next to you, along with the lunchroom and water cooler.
The Charter was well received but there were questions from upper management about how using this type of environment could affect the call center metrics (average handle time, after call wrap up, etc). Can anyone comment on other companies that have online communities for their staff? How did they mitigate productivity risks?"
Your mistake was to ask upper management for an official project. Instead, just ask your co-workers for their IM contact information and get to know them that way.
the company could promise people dont use it as a place to vent their frustrations with customers.
Are you hiring? Any language requirements? What company? What kind of call center? Come on man, hook a brotha up!
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Say it can save time by having logs of how to fix stuff vs having to google the same stuff over and over.
Roll it out to a test group first.
Make sure they understand that this is a privilege, and that if important metrics are negatively impacted it will go away.
Measure over a 60 day period. Be sure to incorporate user-feedback as well.
You should check out Clearspace (http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace). We looked into the product when searching for collaboration software. Ultimately we didn't pick it since it didn't fit our needs quite right, however it sounds perfect for you. Builtin forums, user profiles, wikis, and a host of other things.
In the end it is the responsibility of the agent to stay within metrics. I would recommend sticking with the knowledge base you have already, but wikify it. I lobbied for a wiki at the last call center I managed, got it, and our agents' productivity skyrocketed. You don't need to go much further than that.
If one of your techs finds a way to make X do Y faster, let her put it on the X article. She doesn't need to post it in a social forum full of "lol" and "did you see the new guy's shoes". Wikis are great for call centers, but social environments would definitely tempt agents, since they would be "company-sanctioned".
;-)
Anyone who would waste time on the offical company forum is already wasteing time.....on sites like slashdot.
I was going to say that they already have a knowledge base for that, but it seems they don't use it for that purpose. They really should.
I worked in customer service as in-game support for an MMO. We had a massive wiki which aided us greatly in helping with player problems. Step by step instructions for solving common problems etc, explanations of how each quest worked and so on. Granted this was all a text interface, allowing multiple 'calls' to be taken at once, with a liberal use of macros. I can't comment on how effective it would be in a one on one voice based call, but it did provide a quick and easy way to find information on nearly anything a customer needed help with.
Long ago and far away I worked for DEC in the UNIX support team. We were spread out all over the world and had the normal complement of call history, system documentation and troubleshooting databases.
When we started using IRC to share real-time information about callers problems our time-to-close went down significantly and closes-per-day went way up.
The improvement was significant enough to get the attention of other departments and the IRC usage - along with several bots for integrating the call handling and mail response systems into the IRC channels - became wide-spread in the support group.
This system survived the DEC/Compaq merger and on into the HP buyout.
If I were to do the same thing again I'd use a jabber server rather than IRC but the principle is the same.
I used to do helpdesk with a 1+ mile communte both ways, in unfomfortable cubes with obsolete equipment. ;) so I could have the DB frontend on one display, and technical forums/the company WIKI on the other.
I'd have been much happier to do my job at home, with my nicer display - infact, I have 2 displays (as per the poll
The machines we had at the psysical work locatin were P2 300's running NT4, on 14" displays - you could barely google for a fix before the customer had hung up in frustration. (it was a premium rate line too - shocking stuff.)
The suits can still keep an eye on you by monitoring your calls, so I really can't see why it isn't done.
120 characters should be enough for anybody
if your employes aren't talking then you've got one hell of a productivity risk just in that.
Though most call centres I call are dumb and can't answer questions anyway so I doubt your productivity will be much lower than theirs.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You've got executive issues.
using this type of environment could affect the call center metrics average handle time, after call wrap up, etc)
There is no answer you can give that *improves* the metrics they cite. That's a polite way of rejecting your idea. You are entirely missing the point of a Call center. To answer calls. That does not mean offer help, because that takes too much time. The productivity metric is calls per hour, not satisfied customers/knowledgeable Reps per hour.
If you want to advance in this organization then figure out a way to tweak the company's productivity metrics to make it look like they are doing more work. Ignore the customer entirely when coming up with schemes. Executive management treats most customers with contempt, so you'll look like you fit right in.
Chances are excellent the Reps have an informal community anyway.
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If you want your employees to waste time in online communities, you could could just remove the myspace and facebook blocks at the proxy server...
Over here, instead of a web-board or something like that, management setup a chatroom on our IM server. They then encouraged everybody from front-line tech support up though the developers, sysadmins, engineers, and their managers to join. Attendance is encouraged but not mandatory, and it's been emphasized heavily that people are free to speak their minds about any subject including bashing management without reprisal -- just don't get into a flame-war. What resulted was the room became a mechanism to instantly escalate any issues which the tech support folks couldn't handle as well as a place where you could easily bounce new ideas around to find out how a change would be perceived by the various stakeholders. Our users got a huge win as most problems are now solved while the user is on the phone rather than having to wait while the ticket works itself up/down the hierarchy. The rest of us got a place to blow off steam as well as bounce ideas around people from diverse areas in similiar position levels.
Its an exageration to look at an online community as a risk to productivity of the call-center.
One can understand your concern AND one can understand the management's concern (which is to not loose their job or tell you before hand that if anything goes wrong it will be your fault, or thats what they are trying to say right here, eluding their own responsability to provide tools to make people more productive because they are afraid that using them might or might not reduce productivity: i mean, did they loose their balls in traffic???).
So, what I am saying here, is that you shouldnt tell them. You should go ahead and start blogging your experiences and then trying to attract others to comment on them and then move on to the community phase, once the approach of knowledge sharing has proven important to the bussiness process.
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Why does a call center need a community? Why don't you just call each other? I don't get it.
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Of course the hope is that this will actually lower call times. So in that instance, I would propose a test run with a sample group and see how it impacts their metrics over a period of time and compare to the control group.
The key thing to communicate to management is that they will at some point need to take a small risk in testing this. But you can try to find research to back you up for how/why these systems can improve metrics. A good way to do so is look for a couple vendors who sell these systems and get them to share their metrics and then just pass those on.
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"The Charter was well received but there were questions from upper management about how using this type of environment could affect the call center metrics (average handle time, after call wrap up, etc)."
You didn't understand the question. The manager was asking "How will this affect my bonus?"
Easy. If the SLAs start to suffer, just increase the frequency of beatings applied to the cattle.
If THAT doesn't work, move to phase two, tazers.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
You do this by looking at what's _actually_ happening as part of the handling process - how does an out of band call get handled normally? What is the overhead for playing 'hunt the doc' vs. being able to pipe up in an IRC channel 'erm. What's ... and who should deal with it'?
Productivity is massively increased by wiki-style adaptive documentation, and by passive streamed communications in the form of IM/IRC, because they fit in the gaps in a 'normal day'.
But ideally you'll pick on one current efficiency, highlight how much time it takes, and how your thing will reduce that. As time = money, it's easy to make 5 minutes per day, x however many employees enough to justify your time.
Perhaps the documentation revision process? What happens when 'something changes' or someone notices a typo/error in a document - how long does it take to review, and how much is 'lost' by it being inaccurate whilst it is reviewed. Also, how often does it actually change at the moment, and how often _would_ it if it was less of a pain. These are things that a Wiki makes handy.
A more esoteric example is that of morale, and how that can have such a pivotal effect, but you'll have a hard time getting solid numbers on that. So it's best kept as a general handwavy 'secondary objective', and just keep with the thing you have got some guesstimate numbers for.
Granted, this can still happen (and often does) when the tech has access to other techs for suggestions, but it doesn't have to. If the company had (let's say) a private chat server and one or more chat rooms for techs only, somebody who couldn't tell which of several fixes to try first could ask questions and get back suggestions as to how to narrow the possibilities down. Management might go for this because it would be easy for them to monitor and keep the techs from using it for time wasting. (Just like you they don't have to monitor every call for it to have an effect; just knowing they might be listening in can keep you on your toes.)
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We are not a call center, but we are a "distributed" software engineering company, with offices in different cities.
We use a combination of Campfire (37 Signals) for group chat, and an IM application such as iChat, Adium, Trillian, or Gaim for private one-to-one chatter. (Many IM programs will interoperate these days, but it is usually best if you can get most people on the same software. For example, iChat with the Chax plugin will talk to people with Jabber, AIM, or ICQ IM accounts, but not MSN.)
This works very well. I communicate regularly with people in other cities with this setup more than I ever communicated with the person in the next cubicle, at that other company I used to work for.
As an added bonus, you get to learn which of your co-workers is a furry.
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I found that we all had great input into fixing common problems that we ran into, which never made it into the documentation that was supplied by the company. (I worked for a contract company that handled support for a large computer manufacturer) We would go to each other for input. Folks from other call centers did not have access to us or we to them, and it would have made a better pool of knowledge, and made resolution time quicker. I think this is a good idea you have. Good luck with it!
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It's gotten a bit quiet there recently, and they'd be more then willing to have new people drop in, whether Con employees or not. Good call-centre horror stories are always welcome.
I managed a small technical support contact centre of 80 full-time and part-time agents. About half of the agents also worked from home, like your situation. When we we trialed the ability of agents to work from home we identified the need to keep the agents connected. We used MSN Messenger for a while but soon recognized that this wouldn't work long term. We implemented and IRC chat server and found this fit our needs. When we were implementing this, I admit that I had the same questions as your management staff had. The results were surprising and very positive from a management point of view: 1. Our average handle time went down 15 seconds 2. Our productivity (calls handled, time on phone) went up 10% 3. We were able to keep key employees even when they moved out of our employement area 4. Improved the first call resolution rate by 5% I also believe this was a factor in our ability to have a low employee turn over of 8% in the contact centre. Later we were able to leverage the technology to improve communication between the contact centre and other groups in the company. Announcements regarding current operations situations could be quickly conveyed to the entire team reducing the trouble shooting time during an system outage and improving communication so efforts were not duplicated. Hope this helps and good luck.
a wiki.
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I'd expect that after a short period of time getting the system running, you'd see an improvement in the metrics. Help-desk support productivity is strongly enhanced by rapid access to answers - either in a knowledge base or via an interactive chat. Hopefully your management isn't overly guided by day-to-day metrics and can occasionally think more strategically.
Not everyone knows all the questions to all the answers, but over any decent-sized operation SOMEBODY will. The idea is to leverage that "institutional knowledge" against customer questions, each of which has the potential to add to that knowledge base.
The biggest drawback is keeping the information organized for easy retrieval - ie: the most commonly-encountered questions and answers on top, good search capability, etc.
Also, create a metric showing who is most effectively posting to the knowledgebase and how well it is impacting the other metrics (ie: call volume, time, etc). One or two people who are "experts" that post answers that strongly improve other employees' productivity may not have that contribution reflected in "their numbers" and appear to be inefficient, whereas their real impact on the company is overwhelmingly positive, and their loss would greatly harm the company.
I work for a large company with many call centers and as far as online community these are kind of out there already. Some of our groups use IRC channels to converse and get help, while others have IM at thier disposal.
There also are many message boards out there for people who work from home taking calls (workplacelikehome.com). I don't see this being too different. People use this to chat, vent, and let others know what's going on. When working from home, you really have to manage yourself. There is time between calls where you can check this, but when it comes down to it, if your statistics are not in line with others, management will let you know. When working from home, you are not totally seperated from the company you are working for. They can monitor call times, when you log in/out, wrap up time, etc. It's like any other job, sometimes you have time to talk, other times you need to focus on what you are doing. And if you spend more time socializing than working... well the same thing happens as it would anywhere else.
I worked in a call center for over 3 years. I started on the phones (1.5 years), moved to Quality Assurance (1 year) and then moved to the IT team as a developer (1 year). I hope I can provide some insight.
The call center that I worked at had something similar to what you are asking for. We had a central portal with integrated messaging, suggestions, forums etc. Each of the representatives logged into this portal when they started their shift. The portal application was designed so that any incoming call would take precedence over what the agent was doing -- in other words, if the agent was browsing one of the community forums or if they were sending a private message etc., an incoming call would automatically execute the application for that call and bring the call application into the foreground.
This is the approach that we used. Maybe this could help.
Having spent eight years designing call center applications, I can tell you the one metric you'll want to point your bosses at is the potential to increase first level call resolution. You should balance any increase in call handling time with the potential for greatly reduced call escalation. The key to this is involving the second and third level escalation points in your wiki.
When I worked at the Egghead call center in Washington back in, I think, 1996-ish, we tried this out. It was a rough place to work at the time. The employees were miserable, management was ineffective and, at the executive level, absntee. Sales hated marketing, marketing hated tech, and everyone hated the executive team.
We used an o-o-old version of Notes (on our 16-20Mhz Macs with 1MB RAM and a RAM doubler, 2MB if you were buddies with the tech team)...our "database integrity" guys, who researched products and played games all day, came up with the idea of posting a "product of the day" blog. It worked great, and there was good discussion; management let it blossom. Then someone in the call center started posting general questions, insight, complaints, etc, and that became more popular than the product blogs. It became a carthartic thing; people would hate on the company and customers on the company-wide Notes databases. Management, of course, shut it down, which drove morale even lower. Soon, someone set up a rogue database, and the whole thing continued, albeit without managment knowing, and REALLY started ripping on the company. Four months later, which the whole company was shut down and sold to Surplus Direct (which was later bought by Amazon), and nobody was all that surprised.
So, I guess the point is: it can work, but figure out in advance what you want from it, and decide before implementation how far you'll let your users take it, or you run the risk of it blowing up in your face. You'll lose some productivity, but that's going to happen anyway, either at the water cooler or on Slashdot.
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This community environment would be intended to simulate being able to talk shop with the person next to you, along with the lunchroom and water cooler.
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"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One side note about the whole idea. Depending on your work - and if you have tiers of support, someone posting a How-to fix something that goes against policy would need to be tracked. ie; How to fix Y is Tier 3's Job, but gets posted at Tier 1's level may cause a stir. Then you have things like unofficial fixes, that may not work all the time. It may become your job to keep on top of the updates, on top of everything else you do.
The thing is that you can immediately use the forum to find an answer by posting to lots of people at once. If you can toss it up where 30 eyes can look at it, you may get a lot better response than just looking for keywords in the db...
But I think they're right, it's going to devolve into a bit of a productivity block...
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My girlfriend worked as a graphics artist at a medium sized advertising agency (that got gobbled up by Ogilvy), that did a lot of Web stuff. She smokes, and regularly met people from other departments and exchanged ideas and gossip about "what was coming next." The higher management realized that this had positive benefits. Mangers in the advertising business are not necessarily very "intelligent", but they are very "smart" or "sharp", in the "sly" sense of the words. One manager was giving a briefing about a new project to a new team, and noticed that the smokers already knew all the details.
They floated around ideas about how to emulate the "Smokers' Meetings" for non-smokers, but never found a model that would work for non-smokers.
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Whatever you think of Best Buy, they have a successful internal community in Blueshirtnation.com. A google search turns up quite a lot of industry praise on those guys. It was even written up the Groundswell book by Forrester.
If you want your bosses to buy, make sure you give them plenty of examples of other companies being successful at it.
For me, the biggest business benefit to the call center is knowledge sharing, but you have to be careful because communities need a critical mass in members to be successful (or a highly dedicated internal resource building content and encouraging participation). Only the biggest call centers could make it self-sustaining. However, another idea might be to launch a peer-to-peer support community and invite your customers in. You can have a private area for employees, but have a larger area where customers can ask support questions. And unlike email, once a question is answered, everyone can use it. Dell, Lenovo, Juniper, Linksys, AT&T, Blackberry all have successful support forums.
On IRC, I use it at work but my frustration is that it has no real history - I've seen the same questions come up time and again. On a forum you can search and find past discussions.
Disclosure: I work for Lithium Technologies , an online community provider.
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#1 unless paid on results or activity while going through a strct QA process home working unproductive.
#2 IRC is useful for general background chatter - but has to be controlled.
... on what management values.
In a past career at a large company, we had an extensive Usenet system running within the corporate intranet. It was handy for exchanging best practices among engineers and other employees, finding hidden experts on esoteric topics that then could be consulted within the 'standard' company channels. It was also a great replacement for the 'office water cooler' that extended throughout a company with facilities across the company. Smart managers would lurk on the general newsgroups and pick up hints about the morale of the workforce much more effectively than the obligatory annual employee survey.
The downside (from management's point of view) was that it was a very effective way to bypass management control of the official communications networks. One PHB that tried to run things by his own rules could be found out rather effectively when his employees started comparing notes with others. As the company started outsourcing more and more of its technical work, the value added by the idea interchange was deemed not to be worth the loss of control over the culture. Eventually, the users were pressured into staying off the system. That move backfired. The reaction was to take the same discussions to an external system (the Usenet implementation had been secured within the company intranet). If one knows where to look, even as a non-employee (which I am now), one can still engage in interesting discussions about the goings-on at the company.
From the point of view of a call center, there may be limited technical utility in such a forum. But people will still engage in social interaction and the time wasted in sneaking off to the bathroom or a smoke break will still be wasted. At least an on-line system will keep them at their desks.
Have gnu, will travel.
Anyone that is working at home, and is a productivity risk, is wasting time elsewhere anyways.
If you loose anything in AHT, it should provide enough of a balance to cost ratio to enhance training. If there is a training budget (big if), that is where it should be allocated.
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I recommend setting up a Team Room to house all kinds of different information (schedules, colleague home phone numbers, pager information, etc). You can also house important documents in this style of environment that can be updated in real-time (word documents, excel spreadsheets, etc). It's also a great place to draw the line in separation of storing sensitive client information (recommended for the knowledge base), and storing the information required for YOUR company (store this information in the team room).
Lotus Notes has this type of functionality in it, and many, many high-end call center's user this type of approach to keeping people connected (using a team-room in conjunction with a knowledge base).
As for keeping in communication with your colleagues in real-time, I recommend another Lotus solution; SameTime. It is IBM's solution for corporate instant messaging; it's very, very secure. Another professional alternative would be Microsoft's Office Communications Server. Additionally, you could go for free and use Jabber.
"Charter was well received but there were questions from upper management about how using this type of environment could affect the call center metrics (average handle time, after call wrap up, etc)."
I recently read (well listened to the audio book) The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Very interesting. It pointed out that for the longest time American factories were using the wrong metrics to measure productivity. The were confused by the fact that their measurements were telling them that their efficiency was good and improving but their productivity was not improving or even getting worse. How long will it take before the PHBs realize that things like "average handle time" don't measure the basic metric of a call center i.e. did the customer get properly and efficiently serviced?
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Actually, he increased productivity by 33%. Before he joined, each employee's average productivity was 33% of the total, so his joining changed it to 133% of the previous total. The next employee will only increase it by 25%.
I'm involved in open communities where discussions are used to ask about difficulties, suggest tests and solutions, and point out oddities. Sometimes these discussions identify issues in enough detail that code and/or documentation changes are made. Without the discussion, the knowledge base doesn't get those improvements.
Half of your call center works from home, and management's concerned about how a Wiki is going to negatively affect productivity?
I think you should be able to wing your way through this one pretty simply. If nothing else, you can simply point out that your solution won't incorporate streaming video of the latest Oprah ...
Back in the day when I was running a call center I would schedule my people for PIE (phone in ear) time for 80% of their day, max. The other 20% was spent training, updating, researching, whatever. But they had 20% of their day when they didn't have to answer the phones.
From what I hear now that's one of those distant memories. Maybe that's why I didn't have a very high turnover and most of that was promotions within the company.
If the company can't see the value in a collaborative environment then there's a deeper issue at hand. If they can't see the value in a collaborative environment just for their call center then it's time to move on to another company that does see the value. Not giving productivity tools means they don't value anything besides your call volume.
The old adage "You get what you measure" means just that. If they only care about number of calls and time on the phone then that's what their employees are going to do. Take calls and get them off the line quickly. Not a recipe for quality service or for keeping call center employees.
What about creating a free voluntary online call center community for OSS software?
People could use existing infrastructure: internet, sip phones, etc., and some call distributing system for the incoming help calls, which would take care of language spoken and competences.
having better relationships within the company is one way that people can find fulfillment from their jobs. This could increase retention, decrease sick time, and in turn decrease the amount of new person training required for the company. This will also likely act as a mentoring program for less trained employees so that they will receive additional skills. The end result, happier more productive workers... at VERY LITTLE COST!
That means that unless the tech knows how to tell which fix to use (and only needs the cheat-sheet as a memory aid) they're going to pick one at random and hope for the best. Then, they'll either guess again or escalate the call and let some more senior tech try to clean up the mess.
Sounds like pretty much every tech support I've ever dealt with. I thought they all worked like that.
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I worked in a call center for Cingular a bit before, and after SBC bought AT&T and had all their companies name changed to AT&T subsidiaries. I started as a regular rep, and moved up to teir 2 tech support within a year (only I don't get a raise like I'm supposed to because they are evil money grubbing bastards). I was pretty disappointed with "tools", as they called them, or software as most of them were now web based, but none of them talked to each other. We launch a web based notation system that launches a billing system, that launches a web based switch control program, and a separate web based map system for locating tower issues, and a separate web based program for checking local routing numbers, and another web based program for changing them. In between calls I programmed a sort of CMS in html and javascript in notepad that gave us easy access to all of our related programs, and I was working on linking the local routing number programs to the first search for their account so you dont have to enter information twice, and a ajax manager to fill out our order forms that automatically looked up correct skew if they pick the maker, model, color. because you would not believe how many times little jimmy got sent a pink razr because it's too hard for people to read the tiny print in the huge table. Management pretty much disapproved the whole way through because they didn't think I could stay focused on my calls doing that, but I had more trouble with remembering where I was in code then starting a conversation with an internal employee over the phone. Big corporations resist change, and often only later catch on when it's too late.
Say it can save time by having logs of how to fix stuff vs having to google the same stuff over and over.
But then your logs will get so big that you'll have to buy a google search engine to search through all your logs.
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Call center is productivity oriented, probably more so than any other activities, and most call center manager can't see further away than AHT (average handling time) and conversion rate/h. It is akin to chain factory work. You have agent working from home, so I assume that they are using either their own pc for the CTI application or a company provided thin client (citrix maybe?).
:)
In any case, they are home, and unless you have installed tracking software and forces them to leave their webcam turned on how do you know what they are doing? Reading a book, watching tv, breast feeding the little one, etc. I guess you don't and rely on your production report to award incentive to your agents and that so far it worked. Your company has already relinquished a lot of control to shave on the expense of renting and furnishing a hangar in suburbia so another forum is not going to change much on your production ratio issue.
Point 1: Some of them are probably already browsing other website and chatting with their friends online giving them an opportunity to do it in an environment controlled by the company can only be a benefit. They'll spend more time focused on their work and the company.
Point 2: Use other metrics to convince upper mgt, what is your current agent turnover? Can you reduce it by fostering a sense of community into your work-alone-at-home-for-a-soulless-company employees? By how much? What is the cost of training a new one?
Point 3: Are you an inbound CC (where quality matters) or are you selling predatory housing loans and credit card (where volume matters)? Can a "community" effect produce an across the board effect of raising the quality of your services without cost. I.E do you expect your agent to learn trick of the trade from one another which will increase either their quality of services or their conversion rate?
Point 4: Most agents don't like their job so expect a lot of ranting on your forum. Don't forget to clarify the posting policy with management and your agents or you'll be in trouble when one of them gets fired for complaining too loudly on the forum and sinks everyone else moral, shoot the turnover sky high and the productivity way low.
I have never heard of a company monitoring the coffee room with camera and mics to hear the dirty jokes made on management so I really believe you should lobby for some partial anonymity. I let you figure out how to implement the "partial" part. And yes you should check with the lawyers...
Rather than focus on AHT, focus on the fact that the wiki and the agent cooperation will improve the agent's ability to solve the calls they get. This improves First Call Resolution, which is a better KPI than AHT. Improving FCR from 70% to 85% will drop your overall call volumes by about 10%, with no noticeable increase in AHT.
My question to you, is given the capabilities to setup VPNs via high speed access, why do such companies still require a separate hardwired telephone line before they will work with you?
I understand the need for metrics, but also know that these metrics can be captured and sent over the same hi speed pipe that I am using (DSL or Cable or Fiber - in my dreams).
DD-WRT and the ability to band shape traffic should remove most if not all objctions...
FYI, When I was a System Admin for a telco, they only had a call center support of about 50 desktops, after a merger, that number climbed into the thousands however I had already left the company for a better opportunity. The few times I provided support for the call center, they did not seem very happy and it was true that the smokers (friends though I did not smoke) did know were all the bodies were buried.
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well, you could always try the daily circle jerk.. ..just sayin'
Can you name any good websites that specialize in contact center management?
The employees will invariably end up using whatever they want to use to communicate. It's just a matter of whether its sanctioned or not. Might as well sanction it because you can the set the policy on use and tie it to the employees evaluation. As for effect on call times when I've used resources like this before while answering the phone it made it much easier for me to find resources and help the customer at hand. A well setup wiki could easily be used to do any number of linear troubleshooting operations. You setup each page to lead to the next step and branch where needed. I think the main time a forum would be used would be during non-call times which happen typically at least once a day for an extended period of time. This of course all depends on the call center. Instant messaging is another wonderful non-intrusive form of communication. Its great for simple one-way communication like leaving a quick note for a supervisor or in requesting help in solving a problem. It also allows the user to multi-task without interrupting either party. All in all I would say the more options you give your employees the easier it is see which will work out naturally. Some people can be very one track minded when it comes to the tools that they use.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
I am interpreting the O.P.'s information request as a request for endorsements for a product suitable for building an online community for a call center and not a request for an already active online community for a call center. I am also assuming that the call center is for an ISV. Here are a few recommendations that are my favorites.
A company called LiveOps, inc. has done this on a large scale with a project called Workspace (http://workspace.liveops.com), which is a ning implementation.
It's targeted at work-from-home agents (agents who work in a distributed call center), but the same idea could be applied to your traditional "brick and mortar" call center.
What management told you was verry short sighted. Not realy unusual for those who want fast money and then jump out of the company. You should have asked them if the organisation rather leans on the technoloogy achievments of indivuduals. Or if they would rather see that the communication would be improved and so the combined know how. By something as a simple lowcost communication method. Well maybe you go all to second life, learn a bit about eachother, and get to know each better. Especialy higher management has some (strange) urge to arange meetings with people face to face. Technicaly my own desicions ar far more important to keep bussines working then such talks. However i can talk with many people on chat or on phone, i have no need for face to face contact, just to solve, and to make profit out if it. In fact i noted that talking in chat, or in a vitual world also does work more efficient, since the lange is shorter, you dont have to ask "take a seat", "how was the traffic ride", "did you stay long in the traffic jam", "maybe you like som cofee first then we can talk", "do you feel allright?", etc etc etc. Chat is just like "DNS error 0xx55BH any ideas?" no introduction, no traffic jam, just a thanks afterwards.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I watch this article with curiosity.
From experience, setting up a forum for the call-center (well, the company in general, mostly call-center employees) quickly degenerates into whining about everything, and pointless posts. It can very quickly lead to employee uprisings and things like that.
Have someone set up a small PC in their cube that runs an IRC server on Linux or BSD of some flavor.
over half of my team telecommutes, and we have used IRC as an effective communication tool for a very long time.
I don't know about other companies, but I didn't require my staff to have a separate phone line. They were required to have a high speed internet connect, a VPN connection to the office and VoIP software on their computer or a separate unit. We didn't like having separate phone lines as there could be a glitch in the calling and they would end up in the personal voice mail of the persons home instead of being handled properly (this happened to one of the OPS team members).
That being said, each company will be different and have their own reasons for their rules.
All the metrics were captured through our phone switch, ticketing system, and survey system. So everyone knew what they were being measured on.
"Later we were able to leverage the technology"
Dude, you just lost me there.