Online Community For a Call Center? 138
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?"
tsk tsk (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Clearspace (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:would be great if.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Second life? (Score:3, Insightful)
As an added bonus, you get to learn which of your co-workers is a furry.
Re:would be great if.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Call centers suck, but i believe you missed the point....while the 'drones' may not be the brightest, they do support your company/organization, if they can vent their frustrations, they become happier... you see their frustrations and make changes, they become more productive...win for the drones, win for the fat cats
Re:would be great if.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Focus on other metrics... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Pilot, Explain, Measure (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:tsk tsk (Score:2, Insightful)