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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.
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".
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 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.
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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.
the company could promise people dont use it as a place to vent their frustrations with customers.
Are you trying to imply that call center drones have anything else to talk to each other about? In my experience, pretty much every conversation in a call center revolves around frustrations with the customers. If you don't spend enough time letting off steam by bitching about the customers, you'll eventually just bottle all that frustration in until you show up to work one day with a shotgun.
Luckily, I quit the call center business before I got to the shotgun stage. Lousiest 6 months of my life.
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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I've actually seen that used as a way to get fired on purpose at my call center.
IIRC, it was a Monday, their rent was due Friday, and it wasn't a pay week. Under the state's law, fired employees must recieve their last paycheck within 3 days of being fired.
As an added bonus, you get to learn which of your co-workers is a furry.
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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.
If set up properly, this kind of forum could actually be used to reduce how pissed you have to get at customers. Depends what's being supported really, but if it's something that goes beyond the level of "reboot your router, wait two minutes, and you should be online again", having a forum where people can post up problems, solutions, and additional feedback can make finding a solution faster and easier, potentially resulting in increased customer satisfaction (lower overall turnaround for solutions, resulting in word-of-mouth advertising, increased customer retention, etc), lower employee stress (they don't have to spend hours fucking around on the phone with a dumb customer trying to debug a known issue), and a central knowledge repo that could get pushed out into a public KB/FAQ after getting cleaned up a bit.
Despite the concept of a wiki I've never really found them that easy to use outside of REALLY big ones (Wikipedia), mostly because the forum design paradigm makes more sense as a whole for finding a solution to a specific problem. Wikis are great for exploring a huge amount of knowledge, but they don't work great for a Q+A system which is typically what you need in a call center.
A good search is absolutely critical, as well as keeping good logs of customer interaction (some sort of CRM system).
A little general discussion area isn't a bad thing, nor is a for sale section and whatnot. Dictating that employees use a forum through policy is one approach, but actually giving them a practical reason to show up is actually effective. If they get in the habit of going to the forum just for the water cooler chat, they'll still be exposed to the content that you actually want them there for. This is even more important for the telecommuting employees, as it would be nearly impossible to block off sites like Craigslist. It can be a tough sell for management unless you really show them the value, but reenforcing that providing tools that employees like to use will help everyone out is a strong value proposition.
(Used to work in software sales)
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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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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.
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
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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...
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.
Are you trying to imply that call center drones have anything else to talk to each other about? In my experience, pretty much every conversation in a call center revolves around frustrations with the customers. If you don't spend enough time letting off steam by bitching about the customers, you'll eventually just bottle all that frustration in until you show up to work one day with a shotgun.
Luckily, I quit the call center business before I got to the shotgun stage. Lousiest 6 months of my life.
As someone who's been doing various aspects of CSR work for the last 9 years or so, 5 of which were on the actual phone, I can tell you there's lots more to talk about. Of course if you're working for the typical american style production-line setup where the sole function of the CSR is to serve as a barrier betweem the justifiably pissed off customer and the guys raking in the cash, then yeah, i can imagine it being the main topic of conversation. If you happen to work for a company that actually gives a damn, or in the case of outsourcing, a client that gives a damn, one might actually see subjects such as cool products, or gaming, or in the case of most of my co-workers...sex. And if you're really lucky...all 3 at the same time ;-)
For the record, about 90% of those co-workers are women...
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