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?"

Comments

Pilot, Explain, Measure

[LaminatorX]

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.

Re:Pilot, Explain, Measure

[eggoeater]

I'm a call center engineer.
It will affect metrics. Without any doubt.
To the call center managers it's all about AHT (average handling time.)
In larger call centers (4000+ agents), shaving 1 second off of AHT will save you $100K a month.
A lot of the products my company sells is all about analysis of call data (MIS) and the ability to better route the call to reduce AHT.

The only way these types of projects/products get sold is to convince the managers that it will help solve the customers problem so they don't need to call back, thus saving money.

It's INCREDIBLY difficult to get a call center manager to spend money on training agents how to better service their customers.

But all that aside, I wish you luck.

Re:would be great if....

[pilgrim23]

I work in Tech Support. A small company, about 800 desktops, and a 4 desk tech support center. About 10 years ago I quit smoking. What this has to do with the subject is interesting:
  Back when I was a gasper I would meet by the designated smoking place with the other poor souls. Smokers at that time represented an excellent cross section of the company from the receiving dock to the corporate office. When I showed up for my quick smoke the conversation would always roll around to the computer headache of the day. Hardware, Network, slow response from the branch office, printers that always hang on a word macro, whatever. And 3 or 4 other people would jump in "Hey we have the same problem!"
This gave me a quick "pulse" of problems that a call log, staff meetings, or all the other tools of the bureaucratic trade never provided. I miss that input.

Re:Say it can save time by haveing logs of how to

[techno-vampire]

Many issues have more than one possible fix. Speaking from years of experience in tech support, knowledge bases of fixes are of limited usefulness and are often misused because all they have are cheat-sheets on fixes. 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.

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.)

Re:if your employes aren't talking

[mikael_j]

You do realize that one reason most techs at call centers come off as dumb is because they're not allowed to solve problems that they know how to solve, or they don't have the tools to solve the problems ("You might break something, now go play with something else like a good little boy") and because they're constantly pushed to handle more calls, right?

Guess what will get a tech employed by a call center fired, is it A) Not properly helping a user, or B) Repeatedly exceeding the AHT. The answer is, of course, exceeding the AHT repeatedly, they don't care if you get pissed about poor service, they're so desensitized to your anger that all your yelling will accomplish is to trigger an urge within them to fuck you over by doing everything by the book (because it will take you ages to get proper help and no one will give them shit for treating you that way).

Basically, what you called a productivity risk is exactly what is the problem with call center productivity. It's all about easily quantifiable data, and "calls handled per day" is a lot easier to quantify than "customer satisfaction". Besides, who cares if your employees are bitter and turnover for 1st line techs is over 100% per year? That just means you don't have to give out so many raises (yes, the head HR guy for a previous employer of mine actually said that).

/Mikael