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Online Community For a Call Center?

Posted by timothy on from the legal-department-would-kill-the-dating-features- dept.

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?"

3 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Say it can save time by haveing logs of how to fix by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Say it can save time by having logs of how to fix stuff vs having to google the same stuff over and over.

  2. Don't give them a social environment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

  3. alan.c.davis@att.net by alancdavis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.