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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?"
Say it can save time by having logs of how to fix stuff vs having to google the same stuff over and over.
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".
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 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.
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.
MG
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.
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.
Escalating calls is never a technical challenge (I've done routing scripts hundreds of times that do just that), but simply a business decision.
Most businesses don't encourage it because it's expensive. As you move up the knowledge chain, the cost of the call increases almost exponentially because the expertise you are bogarting isn't cheap.
eg. for a tech-support call, it's incredibly difficult to weed out callers who actually know what they are talking about vs the typical moron who doesn't know what to do with the mouse.
This is why companies that buy corporate support contracts (usually) get better tech support: the guy calling them is probably from a help desk and knows how to intelligently phrase a technical question.
Basically, if you gave someone an option in an IVR, "would you like to talk to a dumb-ass or would you like to talk to someone who actually knows what they're talking about", you're call center costs would increase x10, and if, as a caller, you selected the second option, you'd be in queue for a week.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.