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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.
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.
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 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.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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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