Customer Story
Learn this Fortune-500 contact center moved to remote training for new agents and dramatically reduced costs and training time.
TLDR
Industry: Fortune-500 remote contact center
Challenge: 12-18 month Time-to-Proficiency, including a 6-week onsite training program
Solution: Implementation of a virtual Find & Follow Training program and knowledge ops platform
Results: 6-week Time-to-Proficiency and an 85% reduction in the training budget
Fortune-500 contact center that assists patients and nurses with difficulties using their medical devices.
New reps would be flown in for a 6-week training program. Time to proficiency still took 12-18 months for most agents.
Remote Find & Follow Training, which focused on finding and following the appropriate digital guide to solve the caller's problem.
85% reduction in training budget and a time to proficiency of just 6 weeks (75% faster than before).
The Company
This Fortune-500 contact center assists patients and nurses who experience difficulties while using their medical devices or have general questions about their devices.
The Challenge
Troubleshooting alerts and alarms is a complicated task that requires a lot of attention to detail. Contact center reps needed to know a lot of information and processes in order to help patients and nurses calling about issues with their machines.
This required the contact center to have a rigorous training strategy. The training program the contact center used was expensive and time consuming.
For each new hire, the contact center would fly all of their new reps to a single location for in-class training. New hires would spend six weeks on-location for an intensive training. This was an exhausting and intimidating process for new hires.
Reps were required to memorize complex processes that included asking questions and directing the caller to perform tasks. The pressure to memorize all of these complicated procedures left many new hires physically ill because they were so worried about making mistakes.
Because they needed to memorize so much information, it took 12-18 months to achieve proficiency after training was completed. Reps still relied on supervisors for support on most calls.
"We wanted a product to help us increase the proficiency of new recruits coming out of training and ensure that there was consistency across the organization."
Operations Director
The Solution
They needed a new training strategy that they could conduct remotely.
That's when they implemented the ScreenSteps knowledge ops solution.
First, the contact center used its ScreenSteps ops platform to create hundreds of troubleshooting guides and call flows. They worked with a ScreenSteps content expert to write simplified guides that are easier for reps to follow while they are on a call.
They also optimized their articles and used ScreenSteps robust search engine so that agents would have quicker access to the articles they needed. As soon as a rep determines the purpose of a call, they can type in keywords and, in less than three seconds, locate the correct resource.
With reliable guides available, the contact center then restructured their training program for virtual training using the Find & Follow Framework. They started focusing training around how to use the knowledge base and guides to find answers. They used the knowledge base to practice real-life calls during remote training.
Internally, the contact center refers to their knowledge platform as The Brain. Each time a contact center rep takes a call, their first step is to understand the reason for the call and then find the corresponding troubleshooting guide in The Brain.
The Results
With ScreenSteps, the contact center has completely rethought their training process for reps. Instead of flying reps to a single location for in-class training, they now conduct all of their training remotely.
This alone has reduced the contact center’s training budget by 85%.
New reps now initially spend time gaining a basic understanding of medical terminology and device functionality, and then move into learning how to use The Brain.
Reps no longer needed to remember all of the details or decipher the technical documentation because these custom guides navigate reps through all of the questions and tasks to properly troubleshoot each and every call.
Contact center leaders wanted reps to turn to The Brain first when they had questions. At first, some agents were still asking supervisors and co-workers for answers, so the company put into place a “no advice” policy. If one rep asks another rep how to perform a task or how to troubleshoot a specific code, the only acceptable response is “Look in The Brain.”
Before, it could take reps around 12-18 months to develop proficiency in handling calls with consistent quality. Now, reps are able to handle complex calls right after graduating from their six-week training. Their level of proficiency is higher, and it takes less time to get there.
The best part: they’ve completely eliminated any variability (and, in turn, risk) when a rep takes a call. Because each rep is following the exact same guide or call flow, each rep is troubleshooting error codes the same way.
This has resulted in better risk compliance, better performance, and money saved.
"What we like the best about ScreenSteps is that the ScreenSteps team is very easy to work with and the application is super easy to use. Making updates to our troubleshooting guides is seamless, and working with the team is an absolute dream."
Operations Director
New hires reach proficiency 50% faster and cross-train in as little as a few hours with Find & Follow Training.