Help- need advice!!

[Catherine]

Hi everybody! I work in a call center where information changes frequently and results in many memos about policy changes to CSR's. Because of the volume of memos, some CSR's have difficulty remembering/ learning new procedures. Does anyone have experience with this, too? Any recommendations on how to maximize learning transfer?

Any suggestions or experiences that anyone would like to share would really help!

[gkern]

We have an internal tool that we developed which sends updated information to the agent's desktop. If you would like to see it, we can actually show it remotely. I would need to send you a link and schedule a time for someone to show it to you. It is probably something that you could develop internally once you see how it works.

Greg Kern
CallTech
512-261-0409

[Catherine]

That would be great! I would be very interested to see what you have developed. My e-mail address and phone number are listed below. Please let me know when would be a convenient time for you. Thanks!

Catherine Martin
Provell, Lead Trainer
Training, Quality Assurance, & Script Enhancement
Office (785)761-3719
catherine.martin@provell.com

[mnehr]

We have actually made an intranet site just for office to spread news and announcements. In many companies, having updates done for an individual corporate intranet either takes to long or their is too much red tape.

We have been able to utilize this site for everything from news, to training, to motivational messages.

It is not expensive to set up either. If any of your employees has any experience with FrontPage and some sort of FTP program, and your IT group can set up a web server (depending on the size of group, even Personal Web Server from MS will work.)

This tool was so effective in our office, almost every other data center has incorporated it.

[smack]

Depending on the size of your center, you may want to consider more than one medium of communication. Here are some of the things that we use in my center with over 500 employees:

-Intranet website. A commitment by a group to operate this without red tape makes this successful.
-Community bulletin board. Post it by the timeclock.
-Put it on the dry erase boards.
-Put together a weekly newsletter to introduce or summarize the updates.
-Print the memo and roster of the team. Pass the memo, have the reps initial off after reviewing.
- Use the PA system to draw attention to the updates. Probably want to keep this message short and sweet but make reference to other resources.
- Get your managers to promote the update and answer questions as they introduce it. Good idea to debrief them first so they can be an advocate for the announcement.

Chances are that these are not "show stopping" ideas that either haven't or aren't currently being used. By putting a combination of these together, you can however move the accountability factor from the messenger to the receiver. And if you have as many updates as you say, it might be a better idea to set the expectation with the reps that they are responisble for reviewing, knowing, and asking questions about the updates.

[cjw17]

We have an On-Line Help procedural manual. Our CSRs are instructed to bring up the on line help procedure for virtually every call, even if they know the procedure. This is because it could have changed since the last time they used it.
It has a search feature & a drill down menu. We also put updates on the home page...so they can see what has changed recently without drilling down.
We have Witness (online, screen scraping, monitoring tool). This allows us to view whether the CSR accessed the online help manual or not (points off on their formal monitoring session)

[sowmyn]

Catherine


We do this on a routine basis. What we have is a software built with "Folio Views" and SQL. This program resides in a local NT server based environment and provides for folio search , SQL search. This again is updated with a link from the e-mail program and selected web pages.

If the e-mail you use currently is " lotus notes " then there can be a cross walk set to capture info. into this database.

The effective use of data mining techniques with SQL and folio view option will resolve the updation as well as knowledge related issues.

Some of them call this as SOK (Source Of Knowledge ) and maintain this as an intranet . But this would be user friendly if the above is put in place.

Feel free to discuss further.

Many a thanks

[rjpasto]

First, I'd challenge the need/value of so many policy change memos - sounds a bit like fire-fighting.

Consider:
1. Categorizind and summarizing memos weekly.
2. Communicating to CSRs via broadcast email with an auto acknowledge feature to ensure receipt.
3. Asking for CSR feedback re: communications effectiveness

Bob Pastorini
The Tele-Monitor Company
bpastorini@tele-monitor.com
800-321-4356