Here is the case study of the pilot mentoring program conducted at one of the leading multi-national call center in India:

 

Objective of the Mentoring Program: To provide an enriching customer experience to all the people who call up seeking customer support. Target group: Inbound call center agents who specialize in provisioning customer service. Various steps of the Mentoring Program:

 

1.Identification of the problem The attention of agents is drawn towards the dip in their performance. They are told about the importance of consistency in high quality service delivery to customers. In this case, some of the worst call recordings were played before everybody (without revealing the name of the agent). This was done to show that the problem was for ‘real’. Otherwise many times agents feel that the call center management overdoes the trainings in pursuit of some utopian perfection. Therefore the management should use real instances to has demonstrate to the agents that the need of training and the specific problem which the training will address. The problem identified in this case was ‘inability to handle irate callers’.

2.Selecting Mentors As this time, it was going to be a month-long mentoring session instead of training, so the mentors had to be selected. The mentors were decided by a method of participatory selection. All the agents were asked to submit their best call recording. Out of these, 20 were shortlisted by the supervisors. All these 20 call recordings were played and put to vote. The records which emerged as the top 5 were finally selected as mentors. The mentors, as is evident, were from amongst the agents. There is a tendency to consider supervisors or quality analysts as seniors. But as all the chosen mentors were agents themselves, so they were considered as peers by all. This is important because the agents find it easier to relate to their peers, than seniors.

3.Assigning Agents to Mentors Each mentor was assigned 20 agents randomly. So with 5 mentors, the total number of agents involved in this pilot was 100. All these agents were introduced with their mentors and an ice-breaker session was held, so that the mentors and agents could build a rapport with each other.

 

4. Mentoring Each mentor was given the freedom to decide how they would encourage their agents to perform better. Some of the techniques which the mentors adopted were: i) Daily huddles: One of the mentors would conduct daily meetings before going to the floor and after wrapping up the day’s work. In the first meeting, they would discuss the key points to keep in mind while working. And the second meeting, they would discuss the challenges faced on that day. This meeting would be of not more than 10 minutes each. ii) Reward for weekly best performers: One of the mentors decided that he would identify the best performer of an entire week, and then reward that person. iii) Appreciation e-mails: One of the mentors regularly sent e-mails with the attachment of the best voice recording, from his amongst his team, to everybody. This way, the others could get a cue about what constitutes a good performance, and everybody was motivated because of constant appreciation.

5. Mentor and Agent Performance Analysis An analysis was done to find out which mentor was to ensure that maximum agents delivered good performance consistently. This analysis was conducted by supervisors and quality analysts. The results for all the 100 agents proved that there was a marked improvement in the manner in which the irate calls were handled now. The agents were much calmer and had a solution finding approach, to deal with the call center agents. These results were considerably better than what could be achieved by through training sessions. The conclusion of this pilot case study was that having long-term mentoring programs works better than having short-term training sessions. As usually there is hardly any follow-up after training is delivered, and the implementation on day-to-day basis is not effectively checked. So the call centers in India have added an edge to their customer service by devising the unique mentoring program. Yet another reason why call centers in India are the most preferred offshore destination for outsourcing call center services !