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?"
Pilot, Explain, Measure (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Say it can save time by haveing logs of how to (Score:2, Interesting)
Wiki use in customer service (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:would be great if.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Central Chat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pilot, Explain, Measure (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Say it can save time by haveing logs of how to (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Really. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Back in the day... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Smokers are better informed ... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:if your employes aren't talking (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:would be great if.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Re:tsk tsk (Score:3, Interesting)
In every call center I've ever dealt with, there have been two things I've noticed.
One is that the floor supervisors (the actual ones, not the second level people who pose as them when callers ask for them) usually care about the agents working under them, and will do what they can to improve their ability to do their jobs.
The second is that higher management cares about their clients, and want to match whatever metrics their clients are setting for them, often to the exclusion of the needs of the agents.
Needless to say, the dissonance between group A and group B results in chaos, and I think is a big reason why most call centers have huge turnover.
So my guess is that among those who actually work on the floor, you'll find a lot of support for this idea. Among those who manage the floor indirectly, you'll find exactly the opposite.