John Linton
....in getting anything worthwhile done - and then keeping it done.
It is always pleasing when you see some tangible results of programs you started a long time in the past and sometimes despaired at your doggedness in persisting with them in the face of 'passive resistance', often no progress for periods of time and more often than not - backwards 'progress'. Way back in late 2004 we decided that to allow Exetel to expand from the less than ten people working in the company at that time we would need to create some knowledge data base for our new employees to shorten their training cycle and we should also make that data base available to our customers to reduce the number of telephone help calls we got about mundane aspects of the service. This was the start of our 'exewiki' project that has progressed glacially slowly for almost six years now - often ceasing making any real progress and becoming totally out of date.
The concept appears simple and hardly onerous - simply get people within the company to record 'perfect' answers to commonly asked support, provisioning, sale and billing questions. Piece of cake. Obviously as this is in every employee's interests (and every customer's) a comprehensive 'wiki' should be able to be created in a few months - at most. Unfortunately that has not been our experience and it has taken us well over five years to create a 'wiki' of around 1,000 of the most commonly asked questions which can be found here:
http://exewiki.exetel.com.au/index.php?title=Main_Page
It is merely a 'step along the way' and the plan is to increase the number of entries to closer to 2,000 by the end of this calendar year. However this has required us to employ a full time 'technical writer' as well as a fairly full time supervisor of this process to continually re-assess the content in detail and to constantly update the entries; as well as to add new ones. However that has not and is not going to produce the required results - of itself.
From March of this year we have instituted a monthly 'exam' for all of our telephone answering personnel whereby a randomly (computer) generated set of 60 questions. This is produced from the total number of wiki entries and each person who talks to customers is required to 'sit the exam' and therefore demonstrate that they have continually read the updates to the wiki and can give the correct answers to the questions that are most commonly asked by Exetel's customers - and not just the questions that are pertinent to their area of support - but questions that cover all areas of Exetel's operations and products. This simple process has seen a significant increase in the level of, correct, knowledge possessed by all telephone answering personnel which can only have made the customer experience better in terms of both speed of answer when they call and accuracy of information.
We are taking this process one step further from July in that the scores on the 'knowledge exams' will play a major part in determining future salary increase amounts and the time frames in which salary increases will be given. It is anticipated that this will accelerate the level of knowledge increase - particularly among new hires we make throughout FY2011. We are doing this by taking a rolling average of the previous four months test scores to create a rating from 1 - 5.
The other major initiative in FY2011 will be the encouragement for our customers to participate in improving and adding to the 'wiki' via a program of offering financial rewards/credits to those customers who add new entries or significantly improve on current entries. We will do this via a forum section and our monthly news letter. Over the coming months we will also re-create our AI functions based on the research we are funding at the Sri Lanka Institute of Technology to provide a free form English Language interrogation ability - however that is also going to be a long project that will be very difficult to accomplish.
So, a long way to go, but we are now seeing the first real improvements to our support processes via an over five year old initiative that has seen more road blocks than freeways over that time.
PS: for anyone interested in great minds:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/decline-and-fall-of-the-us-20100728-10w1x.html
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