The History Of The Knowledge Transfer Approach

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

What is this paper about

What is holiday season

Which types of holidays

What happens during holiday season (shopping)

What is the demand rise during holiday season (%, graphs)

How is the logistics managed worldwide for holiday season

What are challenges (list) faced by the companies in following areas

Order booking

Confirmation of payment

Shipping issues

Refund issues

How can Wipro help

Special offering for holiday season

Use existing voice centre (case for Philippines)

Build tech inventory

Organise job fest, tieup with consultants, give job offers in advance, build enough attrition plan

Focus on key customer service areas only – do not go for everything

To keep cost lower – invite client SME for TTT at location for effective and first hand KA/KT

Remote TA

The Christmas season,[1][2] also called the holiday season[3][4] or simply the holidays in the United States and Canada, is an annual festive period that surrounds Christmas and various other holidays. It is generally considered to run from late November to early January.

It incorporates a period of shopping which comprises a peak season for the retail sector (the "Christmas shopping season"), and a period of sales at the end of the season (the "January sales").

In the United States, the Christmas/holiday shopping season, during which a quarter of all personal spending takes place,[16] is traditionally considered to commence on the day after American Thanksgiving, a Friday colloquially known as either Black Friday or Green Friday. This is widely reputed to be the busiest shopping day of the entire calendar year.

The holiday season of November and December can account for around 25%- 40% of annual sales for retailers, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).

Curt Barry, president of F. Curtis Barry & Company, a Richmond, VA, operations and fulfillment consultant, recalls one unfortunate catalog company that had a holiday gift business with a severe peak period. It contracted with an offshore call center that miscalculated the peak transactions volumes and had no way to recover.

The result was a phone system with limited routing capabilities and an insufficient number of agents fielding calls. The catalog had a high call abandonment rate, because callers were placed on hold for too long or in some cases could not get through at all. When the holiday season was over, the company's outsourced call center had experienced a 24 percent abandonment rate, effectively destroying the catalog's seasonal business.

Knowledge Transfer Approach

Wipro proposes a Complete Offshore Train the Trainer approach for the Knowledge Transfer, wherein, the Bell Trainers / SMEs will travel to the Wipro sites to train and certify the Wipro trainers and first batch of agents. The Knowledge Transfer phase lays the foundation for offshoring the processes and therefore it is of immense importance because it forms a part of mitigation strategy against the following:

Loss of the current operations skill sets during transition

Insufficient documentation of the current processes, metrics, controls and training needs

Attrition of the Bell Canada work force during and post transition process

Knowledge drain/ erosion during the normal course of operations

The training model characteristics will take into consideration the following:

Transition timelines

Criticality of the process to the business

Number of FTEs being transitioned to Wipro’s location

Technology readiness to facilitate training

In the existing engagements, both Wipro and Bell Canada have evolved a number of checklists, controls and processes to ensure the effective management of training. These will be further evolved and used extensively to effectively manage the training requirements.

Process Training focuses on imparting the knowledge of the system, policies and how to operate. It is aimed at readiness to be on the production floor. Everything and anything related to the scope of work on the operations floor is trained during this phase. Customer interaction is an important part of this phase of training. This training is instructor lead and has various practice sessions mixed to give trainees ample opportunity to apply their process knowledge. This phase commences with an assessment to evaluate the competency level achieved. The assessment is a simulation of the transactions to be followed on the operations floor. Successful completion of this phase is determined by achieving the necessary scores on the mentioned evaluation.

Successful trainees move into the On the Job Training / Controlled Go-Live where they handle live calls. Their performance is evaluated daily and feedback for the same is provided. Those who achieve the required scores on the quality metrics are deemed certified. They move on to Production floor and their targets are operations level floor targets. During this phase the trainees interact with live with the customers. OJT offers new hires a controlled live environment to apply the knowledge and skills acquired during classroom training. Continued training support and feedback during this stage ensures a robust training plan.

Properly train temporary agents: Many organizations will employ temporary staff in a bid to reduce wait times for customers. But Baker warns that unless properly trained, temporary agents can be detrimental to an organization. This includes agents who are unable to properly answer a customer's questions or do not reflect the company's philosophy, for example to think outside the box to help customers. Baker stresses that temporary agents need to undergo rigorous training to make sure they're helping rather than hindering the organization.

Wipro Manila

http://www.joneslanglasalleleechiu.com.ph/SiteCollectionImages/Eton%20Centris.JPG

We propose to support the English language volumes of this engagement from our Manila facility from where we support other Bell queues today. Manila was the first Filipino city to be promoted by the government for information and communication technology investments. The Governments help led to the development of more than 80 call centers in the area which have helped to sustain on-going growth initiatives.

Why Manila?

The reasons of selecting Manila as the delivery location for this engagement are below:

The Philippines is one of the largest English speaking nations and hence our choice as an alternate location option to India for English support.

The population of Manila is nearly 12 Million as compared to 3.7 Million in Cebu thereby offering a much larger resource pool

English is the language most widely used in education and business throughout Manila, hence being suitable as an offshore location option to provide support in English for the work in-scope

Has some 200 odd existing IT & ITES players with a total strength of 240,000 employees

Presence of many institutions of higher education including - Asian Institution of Management, University of Philippines, Ateneo de Manila, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Technological University of the Philippines

Wipro Facility Snapshot

Below is a snapshot of Wipro’s facility in Manila:

Present since – October, 2009

Seats - 1250 seats and it can grow up by 1000 more

FTEs – 800FTEs servicingglobal clients

Current Engagements– Some of our global customers from various industries like Telecom, E&U and Media. Examples are:-

120+ FTEs providing Billing and Collections support to one of the largest Telecom Players in UK

150+ FTEs providing Customer Support to a leading Canada-based IT and business services provider for power companies

Over 400 FTEs providing tech support for Bell in Residential 611, Test Center for DSL, Wireline and IPTV services

Talent Sourcing in Manila —Selecting the Best in Class

Wipro already has a strong presence in the Philippines and hence has partnered with many sourcing partners which allows us to quickly ramp up as per our client requirements.

Focus on right skilling

Use of Psychometric profiling

Hire resources with some experience in handling telecom customer support services – to the extent possible

Hire and train resources in soft-skills

Wipro has a large team of recruitment specialists with a proven track record of supporting employee growth in its BPO operations from 120 to over 25,000 in a span of 11 years, across a multi-location set-up. Wipro’s hiring engine is geared up to take on the most demanding of ramp-up plans and has been tried, tested, proven over the years and if required, can ramp up at a short notice. Wipro proposes to seed/ hire people for the in-scope Bell processes based on the following model:

Source the right profile of the people to do the job and shorten the learning curve

Reduce the effort on supervision and training

Provide access to a larger talent pool making recruitment/hiring easier

Use tools like "psychometric profiling" at the hiring and operations stage as part of superior people management practices thus reducing risks associated with attrition and absenteeism

For the in-scope processes, all Level 1 agents will have up to 12 months of work experience, while all Level 2 agents and SMEs will have up to 2 years of work experience. The key skills of an L1 and L2 agents will be as follows:

Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Basic knowledge of computers

Experience customer service / technical support activities

Hiring Plan– Based on our understanding of the current scope of work we will hire resources with the following skills/qualifications:

Activity Skill

Essential

Desirable

Fluent in language skills

√

Good verbal communication skills

√

Good Customer interaction skills

√

PC literate with system navigation skills

√

Good Data input skills

√

Good Data analysis skills to manage billing enquires and disputes

√

Good MS Office skills

√

Task Management & Organization skills

√

Problem solving skills

√

Technical and Wireless background

√

Up-selling / Cross-selling skills

√

Soft skills

√

Table 3: Overall Skills for Agents