Kevin Hartman
Chika Ando
Case 1: Retraining customer service representatives
Learning environment
Xerox, “The Document Company”, a multinational corporation, provides hardware products and services to enterprise users and individual customers. In terms of its business characteristics, Xerox has to maintain good relationships with customers because equipment services, repair services and peripheral sales are important parts of its revenue. As with most companies, Xerox is always trying to maximize its current revenue lines and expand its offerings into new markets.
Most of Xerox’s interactions with clients are conducted through customer support centers located in four different organizations in the U.S. Within each organization, three kinds of services are provided via the phone: equipment service, supplies marketing, and account administration. Each team has different management structure, business processes, technologies, and databases. These three teams receive 22 million calls a year, for an average of 22 calls per day among their 4000 employees.
Concerned about the productivity of the customer support divisions, Xerox has proposed collapsing the three areas into one integrated customer service department as a way to maximize sales and decrease the average number of handoffs each customer receives when calling the company. Currently, Xerox measures its business success by looking at the volume of calls and their brevity. It does not survey its customer satisfaction even though customer support representatives understand that customers are often unsatisfied with their service.
To work as a representative, employees are required to take some training. In a sense, this training plan is well organized because it determines the training needs, designs curricula to meet those needs, determines a general approach for solving problems, and provides a delivery system that provides homogeneous training to different organizations. While this learning design works for educating specialist, it does not for generalist.
Finally, Xerox’s corporate culture plays an important role in determining how the learning environment can be altered and the employees’ responses to this change. When Xerox makes its goals completely clear and dedicates the resources needed to achieve them, its employees in charge of executing the plan are more motivated to do so. However, when the upper echelon of the company institutes new mission goals, which it only half-heartedly supports, the program suffers and the employees quickly lose their drive to accomplish it.
Learning problems
What is the best learning strategy for the integrated customer services pilot, delivering the maximum learning opportunities in the allotted 15 weeks yet being open enough to train new employees without any knowledge area specialization?
At the moment, each customer service representative works as a specialist regarding his/her responsibility. However, if they were all generalists who understood the whole of Xerox’s customer services, the company’s business profit would be increased and customers would be more satisfied. Customers do not concern themselves over which particular service representative is specialized in which area; they are only concerned with the issue that prompted them to call Xerox in the first place. Customers would be more satisfied if a single person solved their problems without having to be handed off or put on hold. To accomplish this goal, Xerox has to reeducate its specialist to become generalists. In other words, employees need to learn the other three areas of customer service and still keep their skills in the area that they already know.
In addition, this learning strategy should be scaleable to 4000 employees in four different centers across the U.S. By sharing one strategy, Xerox can meet the same standard of quality of service and reduce the cost for HR.
To train employees as soon as possible, how can the training organization reorganize to design, develop, and deliver a learning plan that is functionally integrated? And how can they significantly reduce the cycle time from requirements gathering to the actual delivery of instruction? This problem is shared among all organizations, and if it is resolved, every organization would benefit from a solution.
Design Objectives
1) Employees must understand their role within Xerox completely.
When people know what is expected of them and how their part fits into the larger goal of an organization, they tend to perform better than when operating under individual principles. At Xerox, the service representatives’ primary responsibility is to satisfy customers and to build strong relationships between customers and the company. Their roles are critical in terms of making a good impression to customers and enticing them to continue using Xerox products.
2) Too much, too fast, is no good.
We must keep in mind that not everyone learns at the same rate or in the same way, so we must vary our approaches to retraining the customer support representatives so that they are challenged, but not overwhelmed by the amount of information and scale of adaptation the company is asking them to make. Rather than rushing through every conceivable detail that a customer service representative might need to do their job, we should make sure they have the skills to find such information quickly when they need it most. Also, there will be a percentage of representatives that find it difficult to learn the other two areas of the customer service but have substantial knowledge about their own area of specialization. Instead of branding these representatives as failures and casting them out of the company, we can use them as future trainers.
3) Do not measure success as volume and brevity of customer calls.
The volume of calls is one measure of productivity; however, it does not adequately demonstrate customer’s reflection. By observing the details of a call, Xerox can analyze its quality of services.
4) Instill “One Xerox per Customer!” motto.
When customers call to a call center, they cannot choose a particular service representative. In the worst case, their call is transferred several times, and they have to explain their problems again and again to different representatives. For customers, this situation is not acceptable. Each customer should have their issues resolved by a single representative and get off the phone feeling like Xerox helped them.
5) Equity and fluidity of information is essential.
To train the representatives to provide the same quality of service, the representatives should have access to the same information regarding machine repair, customer information, and sales products. This is not to say that each representative must use the information in the same manner or at all. However, this information should be easy to access and in some cases be proactive in presenting itself to the representatives, rather than having them search for it.
Design Solution
1. Integrate all of the various databases into a single knowledge management system.
If all three of the service divisions are supposed to become one, they should all be operating off of the same system. This way everyone has the same information to do their jobs but a large chunk of the information is familiar to them.
By taking the best qualities of CasePoint, we could develop this simple database into an expert system that serves as a knowledge management system shared by the whole company. Instead of having a database solely designed to troubleshoot machine issues, this knowledge base would be utilized to share problem-solving experiences among support representatives, deliver sales tips, record account histories, and display virtual representations of Xerox products.
Not only would this system hold customer’s account information and product information it would linearly accumulate the transactions between a customer and a telephone representative, allowing the representatives to view a customer’s call history and service history if the information is needed. By referring to knowledge in the past, they can drastically reduce the time to feedback.
We will also integrate a problem solving consultation module into the system. Instead of CasePoint, which tried to script the conversations, we will design a module to guide the representatives to solve or clarify problems like an expert would. The goal of the module will be to help the representative narrow down the problem and solve it if possible, but its use is merely an optional crutch.
By analyzing the past sales history and customers’ behaviors on a database, Xerox can figure out its service strategies and sales hints. All kinds of information during calls between customers and telephone representatives should be retained and utilized for marketing strategies and observing their daily operation. Every customer who calls into a call center should be considered a potential consumer. Data analysis of the past will provide sales hints as to what a particular client would be inclined to purchase. The database would also be a good vehicle with which to inform service representatives of Xerox’s new products or services and which clients might be interested in them.
Overall, the goal of this knowledge management system is to support customer support representatives as independent generalists. In other words, the system attempts to achieve the corporate mission of, “One person per call.”
2. Integrate an automated switchboard and call history system.
By having callers enter their identification number before reaching customer service, the switchboard can try to make a “guess” as to why the customer is calling. For instance, if a customer calls once a month to order toner supplies, the switchboard can “guess” why the customer is calling and inform the service representative that ends up fielding the call. Also, allowing the representatives know whom the caller is before they pick up the phone enables them to introduce an element of familiarity and rapport with the customer from the moment the conversation begins. This rapport can be used to compensate for the occasional mistakes that the service staff will be making during its retraining period. Finally, the call history allows different service representatives to immediately decipher what the previous actions have been taken with respect to the current caller without needing to ask the customer.
3. Collapse the three support divisions into one by mixing their staffs.
Our training procedure follows.
- Deliver basic framework and training via the training organization
- Assesses learning at daily operation
- Deliver specific training when needed
- Deliver training on new major products
We create a team that consists of one rep from Account Administration, one from Supplies Marketing, and one from Customer Service and Support.
3.1Retrain this merged group via:
- Pre assessment test
To design a training program tailored to the individual, we provide a pre-assessment test to determine what information the representatives already know. This way everyone does not necessarily follow the same training curriculum. This adaptive curriculum frees up the trainers to concentrate their instruction on the employees who need it the most. Employees with good expertise can significantly shorten their time in the training classroom and go back to assisting real customers.
- Basic classroom instruction of integrated customer support and lab observation
Learning schedule for the classroom instruction
Knowledge area / Phase 1 / Phase 2 / Phase 3Administration / Sup / CSS / Mix
Supplies marketing / Admin / CSS / Mix
Customer Service and Support / Admin / Sup / Mix
Every morning, the members of the retraining groups will spend time in one of two instruction classrooms, unless the pre-assessment determines they already know that days topics. The main goal of the classroom instruction is to help learners form a new mental model of Xerox’s integrated customer services and the two areas in which they do not possess expert knowledge. The classroom provides the schema and frameworks with which the representatives can graft on new knowledge and skills required by a generalist.
- Hands-on labs
The trainees will also spend time getting acquainted with different Xerox equipment in the hands-on lab. If there is a room with products representative to most of Xerox’s product lines, employees can investigate how the products work in order to figure out ways of explaining how to fix problems with the machine without calling a Xerox technician. They can also see which products belong with each other so that they can recommend products to callers with more certainty.
D.Watching and Learning then Doing
The three members of each retraining group work in the same area and learn from each other. For each specialization, the two who do not know it, watch the knowledge area expert work.
Every learner follows the same learning priority order, account administration, supplies marketing, and then customer service and support because of the following two reasons.
1) Whenever representatives receive a call, they first have to use information based on account administration practices. Understanding how the customer information system works should be taught at the beginning of the training regimen, and it could be achieved quickly through watching and learning then doing.
2) Through this training, we wish each learner to get basic communication skills as a representative of Xerox. The communication skills garnered while learning how to enter customer information into the system and gaining a rapport with the customer as soon as possible will server the representatives well in the later stages of the retraining.
Supplementary notes:
Account Administration
During the “doing” process, role-play between learners is necessary because this element anchors instruction in a more authentic activity than the classroom or tutorial setting. It starts enabling the group to think about itself as a team of resources that can be pooled together to solve problems.
Sales
Before the training, we invite everyone into the hands-on lab. It is necessary to understand what they are selling to customers. Visual representation helps to comprehend their business and increase commitment to products. Additionally, we introduce the concept of product lines, which helps them to understand how each product relates to the other and how new products on the horizon affect current products.
Customer Service and Support
While watching the “expert” work, the trainees make their own notes onto the same template of the corporate knowledge database. Thus, they can understand how to use the database, and they can create their own mental models by applying what they learn in the classroom and from the expert.
We hope to develop generalists who can contribute to the team by providing their solution to problems clearly enough for other employees to understand their solution. When a representative contributes remarkably to the team or the company, the representative will receive the “Innovation in Customer Service Solution” award and the monetary bonus that goes with it.
3.2 Train new workers and reeducate current employees.
We have several assessment procedures conducted within the working team, by a supervisor, and by the knowledge management system. In cases where an employee is identified as needing retraining in a knowledge area, s/he can enroll in a retraining program and work along side new employees of the company during that phase of the training program. This policy allows the company to avoid having to train a new employee from scratch and gives new workers another mentor to explain the goal of ICS and acclimate them to the corporate culture.
For employees who failed to master generalization, but are excellent in their specialization, will be able to become on-the-job trainers for new employees, in the same manner that the original knowledge area specialists were for the pilot. The switchboard would only route to them calls requiring their specialized knowledge.
At the other extreme, representatives who become experienced generalist would have the option to become trainers and teach new employees how to become ICSs and retrain current ICSs when one of the assessment procedures identifies them as needing retraining.
3.3 Provide training for future generation of products.
In the customer support organization, we have the hands-on lab. In the lab, we showcase future products and sometimes provide training opportunities. The employees in the pilot retraining program start building the new knowledge management system for the other employees to use to become generalists.
4. Reorganize the training department.
In order to create the type of learning environment where specialists can become proficient generalist in a matter of months, the corporate training department needs to understand the factors that make the standard “four steps to having a teacher in the classroom” approach less effective. If the training organization works together to pare down the curricula for the four service areas so that the generalists are not inundated with information from all directions at once, they can deliver a meaningful program in a short amount of time if they have reinforcements of this knowledge built into either the workplace or the employee’s future training. If all four training divisions talk to each other while designing the training program, Development can start rolling on new lessons while Design is still working, and Delivery can think about how to set up the classrooms before the design is complete. Delivery can give feedback to the other groups telling them what types of media, activities it can support and which areas need further emphasis.