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Leading telecommunications company in the United States   Examples of Success |
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Initial project design and implementationThis client selected Apex as the new provider for inbound customer services in English and Spanish during December of 2003, the contract was signed for a total duration of 5 years and the project consisted originally of 350 FTEs (Full Time Equivalents).Apex faced the challenge of recruiting and hiring 448 fully bilingual representatives which were going to be trained during 8 weeks starting on March of 2004 in order to reach the FTEs goal predetermined by the Client, these representatives were scheduled to start taking calls during May of the same year. In order to support this project, Apex conditioned an entire floor of the headquarters’ facility, building 6 different training rooms; each of them fully equipped with computer stations for each trainee and various media tools. Simultaneously, Apex built and equipped the production floor which would be fully dedicated to support operations for this project. The first training wave began during the first week of March/04; there were 6 different training classes with a total of 173 representatives being trained by the client’s trainers, taking place simultaneously. They were able to successfully finish the training process and on May 3rd of 2004 production started. During the same period of time, our Client’s specialists from different business areas were training Apex’s personnel who would later occupy leadership positions within the project (supervisors, managers, quality specialists, trainers, business management team, IT, etc). The second training wave for this project started during June of the same year with a total of 217 agents. Up to date a total of 27 different waves have been successfully trained; Apex was able to meet every staffing requirement since the very beginning of the project. The first two waves were fully trained by the client’s trainers and the rest of them were trained by Apex’s trainers who were certified by our Client as official trainers based on a certification process that lasted 5 months. Performance indicatorsThe Client utilizes a daily ranking called “Top Center Ranking” to reflect the daily performance of the 14 different OSPs that this corporation has around the world in countries such as the United States, Canada, Mexico, The Philippines, Argentina, etc. The main performance indicators reflected on this ranking are the following:. Quality Performance indicators . Inbound Up-Selling Performance indicators . Talking Time indicators . Staffing indicators, etc. Apex was given two months of “grace period” until being effectively included in the Top Center Ranking on August of 2004. In order to qualify for this ranking the different centers have to reach the goal previously determined by the Client for Quality and Staffing performance. In this ranking our Center competed against more tenured vendors that had been operating for up to 10 years for our Client. Apex was able to qualify reaching the Quality and Staffing performance goals since the first month it was included and progressively escalated positions taking the first spot of the ranking and receiving the “Top Center Award” for the month of April of 2005. Our center is currently taking the first position in the “Year to Date” Top Center Ranking and on the way to taking the Top Center Award for 2005. There is also another competition organized by our Client that only considers their vendors in Latin America which are located in Monterrey (Mexico), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and our Center in Cordoba. Month after month our Center has consistently taken the award for that competition without ever losing the first position to the other vendors in the Region. ChallengesFollowing, are a few of the specific challenges that Apex’s management team faced during the implementation of the project and the corresponding solution that Apex brought to our Client in each case:Challenge I: Only one week before the end of the first wave of training, the Client requested that we completely changed the curriculum of the training which was originally dedicated to cover a specific call type. Representatives had to be trained on a completely different content which usually would take two weeks of training in a one week period of time. Solution Provided: Our management team worked in conjunction with our Client’s training team in order to create completely new training material that would dynamically cover the most important aspects of the content in a one week period of time. Representatives were successfully trained and started handling incoming call volume as scheduled and delivering high quality results only one week after our Client’s requirement. Challenge II: During the months of June, July and August of 2005 our Client closed down different centers around the world and needed extra support to handle a larger call volume. Our Client requested the management team in our Center to recruit volunteers for overtime shifts from Mondays to Saturdays in order to take the larger volume of incoming calls. Solution Provided: Our Center was able to recruit more volunteers than any other center in the rest of the world, being able to handle approximately 40% of the extra call volume showing our Center’s commitment to our Client’s success in customer service operations. Challenge III: During 2005 the Client started to decrease the requirement for customer service representatives that were dedicated to a specific call type (our wave one of training was exclusively dedicated to handling this call type). A total of 150 representatives had to be retrained and relocated in a completely different segment with different work shifts as well. Solution Provided: Our Center trained month after month representatives belonging to the segment that was ramping down to place them in a different one which was dedicated to handle separate call types. This demanded a huge effort from the entire management team, especially from the Human Resources department since many times the representatives had to be relocated in different work shifts which represented a very serious an attrition driver. Based on our Client’s requirement, our management team was able to successfully ramp down a segment, train and relocate the human resources in a completely new segment, keeping the attrition levels at a minimum. Important Facts. Apex is the largest provider of inbound customer services for this Client. Our Center started operations taking incoming calls for only one specific segment of our Client’s customer service platform. Currently; Apex handles calls from 7 different segments.. Our Client originally had 22 of their own staff members working in our Center during the first stages of the project, this number decreased progressively and currently there are only two staff members on site. Other specifics delivered to our customer. During initial project design, our Project Engineering Team detected that the network directions proposed by the Client as a connectivity scheme was not appropriate since it would not be able to support simultaneously the number of work stations needed by the project and also because it limited the growth expected during steady state. Our team created an alternative plan for the implementation of the connectivity scheme which was reviewed and accepted by our Client. The scheme proposed is the one currently being utilized to support daily production.· This Client also had a plan to migrate all Citrix Servers utilized during daily production to a new version of this server and chose our Center (out of a total of 14 centers that this company has around the world) to run the pilot tests due to our Center’s previous diligence during the implementation of different technical updates. Our team worked in conjunction with our Client’s international implementation team to ensure a smooth transition. Based on the information obtained through this pilot test, our Client was able to migrate the rest of the vendors to the new platform without any major incidents being reported. For this reason, our Center was selected once again to run the pilot test to implement the Mainframe emulator over Citrix Sessions achieving positive results and helping once again our Client to successfully perform the implementation in the other centers. · Our IT team provided technical support to one of our competitors in Buenos Aires. Our team assisted this Vendor in resolving a “call dropping” issue that they were experiencing at the moment which seriously affected their productivity. Our team worked in conjunction with our Client’s National Implementation Team and Teleperformance’s Technical team (our Competitor) in a series of conference calls. The involvement of our team was critical to expedite resolution. These are a few clear evidences of the confidence that our Clients have in our ability to consistently deliver high quality results and of Apex’s commitment to providing business solutions which make a substantial difference for its Clients. |
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