Call Center Coaching Success Story             

Situation
Ascom TEMS (formerly Ericsson) technical support was looking to become more customer focused by changing the engineers’ mentality toward customer communication. With their customer satisfaction score at 3.5 (on a 5 point scale), management wanted to focus on improving customer satisfaction rates to achieve the company customer satisfaction goal of 3.9. In addition to their main goal, TEMS also wanted to focus on the following areas:

• Continuing professionalism, even after an engineer becomes familiar with the contact
• Understanding customer needs
• Dealing with upset callers
• Classifying issues properly
• Improving overall communication skills (verbal and written)
• Increasing productivity

Action Taken
Ascom decided to partner with Impact Learning Systems due to Impact’s emphasis on business results and their blended learning format. This format offered a combination of online learning and classroom reinforcement which allowed Ascom to maintain productivity levels while completing the training requirements. Mark Laing, Americas Regional Support Manager, selected the training program Getting to the Heart of Technical Support™ for the technical engineers, and Getting to the Heart of E-Mail Communication™ for the entire staff. The programs included online modules which allowed Ascom’s employees to complete the training at their own pace. Once the online learning was complete, an Impact trainer facilitated an onsite training session to reinforce the skills learned in both programs and coached the manager on how to follow-up the learning with on-the-job reinforcement tools.

Results
The positive reaction to the program and extensive management reinforcement resulted in the TEMS business unit achieving a customer satisfaction score of 4.1 seven months after the training. One year later, the score had increased to a 4.19, a 20% improvement!