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Stimulating Simulations: Convergys' Improves Call Center Performance
October 20, 2008
By Holly Dolezalek
Convergys is a customer service and HR software company based in Cincinnati, OH. One of its biggest lines of business is training call center agents to provide customer service, sales, and technical support to Convergys' clients, such as T-Mobile and Wachovia Financial Services.
As part of the new hire training program for call center agents, Convergys uses simulations extensively. Using a browser-based platform from Knowlagent, a simulations provider in Alpharetta, GA, Convergys runs its agents through various call scenarios with "clients," and provides other types of training. Agents work with customers, use systems, learn the process for handling a call, and get feedback and assessment at the end of the simulation. The company also uses another simulation to teach leaders and managers how to coach agents during calls.
"We use Flash and Captivate to simulate the call, and photo stills to simulate the customer," says Scott Kissel, director of learning consulting and curriculum for Convergys. "The scenarios include dynamic branching to pitfalls, mistakes, and good choices for customer interactions. That gives the agent room to fail, and also to learn."
An important part of Convergys' simulation strategy is assessment. Agents in training get coaching and feedback during each simulation on what went right and what went wrong. But before they "graduate" from training, they are observed on a live call.
Kissel says the immersive nature of simulations makes it possible to spend less time training agents and more time improving their actual performance. "Agents trained this way can start taking actual calls, without the need for an extended classroom or role-playing program, within days instead of weeks," he says.
Call centers are metric-heavy environments, and so it's easy for the business analytics team that tracks agents' performance in the simulations to gather a lot of data and analyze the value and effectiveness of Convergys' training. The team has used that data to compare the performance of a control group after ordinary training to a pilot group that is trained by way of simulations, and to show that simulation training is having a strong positive effect on performance.
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