Contact Center/Call Center Development
Integrating outsourced technical, back office and customer service operations in countries such as China, India, Costa Rica, Canada, South Africa and the Philippines is a challenge for global service organizations. ITAP International offers a holistic approach to improving customer service performance for both the outsource/offshore vendor companies and for their clients.
Culture is a competitive variable in the entire customer service cycle, affecting everything from site selection, agent selection, agent training, and general quality and performance. Cultural preferences define customer expectations and these expectations vary greatly from one culture to another. ITAP's tools and solutions for the offshore call center market are intended to address cross-cultural differences that, if not expressly handled, can negatively impact agent performance, management performance, and customer experience.
ITAP provides the following call center performance improvement services in every stage of the Employee Lifecycle.
Stage 1 - Recruitment & Selection: Leverage PROFILER to hire the right candidates.
A. Define success factors that align to the cultural preferences of the customer. Most vendors contract to handle the offshored customer service operations agent selection. While this is generally appropriate, ITAP believes the client companies might be more able to define success factors against which the vendor/partner hires customer service agents on their behalf. NOTE: Success factors are the agent attitudes and behaviors necessary to ensure a positive customer experience. Identified success factors, specific to YOUR company/customers can be loaded into ITAP's proprietary Profiler software - the world's only competency builder/assessment tool that allows for importing culturally appropriate success variables (and importing competency models in languages other than English).
B. Design interview process. Defining the success factors is the foundation for selecting candidates who can succeed and who will stay. How do hiring managers know whether the candidate possesses the desired competencies? Traditional interview techniques ask questions such as "Tell me about yourself" or "What are your strengths?". ITAP designs interview programs based on Behavior Event-based Interviewing (BEI) or Targeted Interviewing (TI). Because the best indicator of future performance is past behavior, ITAP's approach is to design interview questions that uncover what the candidate actually can do (not what the candidate believes - or wants the interviewer to believe - that they "would" do). Then we train the hiring managers to perform interviews and compare candidates against each other in Profiler.
Stage 2 - Orientation/Onboarding: Use Culture In The Workplace Questionnaire™ to make the agent aware of individual and customer cultural traits.
C. Design candidate pre-assessment. When vendors handle selection, clients may want to increase the likelihood of new employee success by measuring the baseline capabilities of each new employee (and performing a post- training assessment to measure learning). The purpose of this test is to measure the effectiveness of the orientation/onboarding/training program. The test should address knowledge, skills and abilities as they exist before the training starts. Tests also expose any weaknesses that can be addressed through training.
D. Administer the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™. Orientation training in the offshore call center setting usually includes accent neutralization, language usage, and some general training on cultural differences between the agent and the customer. ITAP can enhance understanding of the cultural differences by introducing the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™, an instrument that reveals cultural personal preferences along Hofstede's dimensions: Individualism, Power Distance, Certainty, and Achievement. By framing the culture training around the participants' results, defining the dimensions, introducing the differences in customer country/culture score and the agent's individual score, the otherwise abstract and obscure topic of culture becomes relevant and tangible. To learn more about the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™, click here.
When outsourcing customer service to an offshore location, perhaps the most critical ingredient for success, and often the only major area which the client has not contracted to a vendor, is the quality of the agent training program which includes learning about company information, products/services, specific customer service skills, systems knowledge and policies/procedural information. Conceptually, ITAP differentiates between orientation/onboarding which can be generic, and workforce development which must be specific to your customer needs. ITAP recognizes that these are often structured as separate modules - with the outsourcing vendor responsible for the general cultural training and you responsible for handling culture in the context of serving your customers.
E. Conduct cultural audit. Simply transferring existing training programs overseas is not recommended, even in countries where English is commonly spoken (such as India, Canada, the Philippines, and South Africa). ITAP recommends reviewing all aspects of the training for cultural appropriateness through a cultural audit process. Conducting the cultural audit and adapting workforce development accordingly is important for several reasons.
1) Customer experience is culturally determined -- customer expectations vary from one country/culture to another. ITAP analyzes your customer footprint and assesses what the agents need to know about your customer (plus contextual information - for example for credit card call centers - about the other culture's banking system, attitudes about credit/debt, and customer expectations - which are culturally determined). ITAP bases its audit analysis on Hofstede's dimensions and the work of Erik Granered in the book Global Call Centers: Achieving Outstanding Customer Service Across Borders and Time Zones (Nicholas Brealey, 2005).
2) People from different cultural backgrounds have different learning styles. Simply adapting the training to the trainee's learning style is not the whole answer, however. A more effective approach is to make the learners aware of their learning styles and the design the lessons to be both familiar and unfamiliar. Unfamiliar instructional lessons are productive in that they can introduce the learner to culturally different communication styles and expectations, preparing agents to interact with customers.
3) All learning for call center agents needs to include experiential learning (and not learning at the expense of your customers). Designing program materials with lots of practice built in (with correct answers and excellent role models (such as actual calls), will significantly improve their readiness.
4) From experience, ITAP also understands that there is often a high level of turnover in overseas call center trainers. The quality, clarity and consistency of your training program materials in terms of instructor guides, instructor certifications, and training evaluation methodologies are fundamental in ensuring the success of the trainees. Supporting the learning process through the instructors, program materials and assessment is an important key to achieving consistency in the learning output.
5) No amount of service level definition and tracking can impact your customer service performance like high consistency and high quality in the offshore workforce learning programs. This can only be achieved with a full appreciation of how culture impacts customer experience. Agents need to be inculcated with information about the "customer experience" as well as the customer expectations for service.
F. Conduct post-assessment. To ensure the effectiveness of the onboarding and workforce development programs, ITAP designs behaviorally oriented post-assessments that include culture-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities. These are used to continuously improve the effectiveness of the programs. They also can be used to negotiate with your vendor companies if the outcome of their selection processes or pre-process training is less effective than desired.
Stage 4 - Performance Management: Manage With Cultural Awareness
G. Select and train the management team. Knowing what skills, attributes and behaviors make successful team leads, supervisors and managers is a key first step to determining which people will be most successful at developing the call center workforce once the learners are "on the production floor."
Managing the performance of the offshore vendor is clearly a high priority. Beyond legal agreements and tracking service levels, cultural variables are perhaps even more important in management effectiveness. Cultural differences show up in areas such as how priorities get communicated, approaches to conflict, desire to engage in personal conversations, and emphasis on hierarchy, just to mention a few. ITAP has a training program called Managing Across Cultures that includes several of ITAP's proprietary assessments, global leadership building skills, global team building strategies, plus global call center management lessons from Erik Granered's book Global Call Centers.
H. Assess employee performance with Profiler. The Success Factors that were defined in the Recruitment and Selection stage are now the competencies against which the vendor can monitor employee performance. The reports from Profiler allow all involved to stay aware of how culture-specific nuances are dealt with and how that impacts overall service quality. In addition, ITAP can recommend culture-appropriate rewards structures and incentives for high performers, though this is commonly left to the discretion of the overseas vendor.
Stage 5 - Succession Planning - Leverage PROFILER to compare talent across an organization and leverage ASSESSOR to provide in-depth analysis of individual capabilities.
I. Identify candidates who are ready for promotion. Your vendor's success is your success when it comes to providing great customer service. What you want to reward are those managers and supervisors who can guide the workforce to best serve your customers. Profiler allows an objective process of promotion and reward, aligned to cultural nuances and identified success factors. In addition, reports on employees or managers using the Profiler competency software can identify both who is ready to take on additional challenges and who needs additional development (and in which areas this development should be focused).
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