Case Problem Design Proposal

Xerox Case Study:

Detailed Solution and

Suggestions for Scaling Up

Osvaldo Jimenez

Brian Tobin

Ruhi Vasanwala

Learning Problems and Design Objectives

Xerox is a Fortune 50 company, whose collective call centers across the nation handle approximately 22 million customer contacts per year. There are roughly 4,000 call center employees that respond to customer calls for one of the three customer service areas. The first area deals with requests for repairs and/or troubleshooting problems with existing customer equipment. The second area focuses on issues regarding account information for billing and other related account information. And, the third area concentrates on ordering supplies and supply pricing. These 3 customer service areas are supported by 4 different functional organizations: Equipment service, supplies marketing, account administration, and telebusiness. Accordingly, each organization has a separate 800 number(s), a unique management structure, independently defined work processes, varied technical infrastructure, disparate databases and information systems, different work spaces/facilities.

The irony is that all 4 functional organizations and by extension the 3 customer service areas serve the same customers. Moreover, the call center employees often require similar customer information to respond to the requests. Likewise, the call center employees share a common goal, which is to take care of customer needs and solve problems primarily through a telephone process. However, as these Xerox’s call center employees operate as specialized “silos”, they can not maximize their inherent knowledge to effectively care for or service the Xerox customer base. Often a customer’s problem may be multi-dimensional and requires input from more than one functional organization. But, when such multi-dimensional customer service situations arise, a call center employee is limited in the level of assistance s/he can provide and therefore “hand-off” the call to someone else, i.e., another call center employee representing another organization. Thus, this hand-off behavior fosters functional barriers for employees, their customers, and the company.

The functional barriers referenced above prevent learning, cross-functional collaboration, employee motivation, and customer satisfaction. The Xerox call center employees are over specialized and under empowered. These employees only have knowledge of one customer service area (repairs, billing, or supplies) and cannot provide the customer value in any of the other two areas during a single telephone conversation. This feeling of helplessness does not do much for an employee’s feeling of job satisfaction. In fact, Xerox has a turnover rate of about 25% per year within the call center. Call center employees remain stifled, as they cannot grow their knowledge and skills beyond their silo.

Hence, a learning solution must be designed for Xerox to enhance cross training across its functional areas, empower its call center employees, transfer knowledge within the organization, and increase customer service efficiency and effectiveness. The design objectives for this learning solution will be comprehensive. Call center employees will be taught the skills necessary to serve across all three-customer service areas that will allow customers to have the one-stop-shop experience. Similarly, a Rubric type model for knowledge transfer will be embraced to leverage and transverse subject matter expertise from the 3 call center areas to all 4,000-call center employees. The solution will be quick and easy to adopt and deploy. It will be scalable to meet the needs of call center employees at levels of the learning curve and instill confidence and motivation, as such.

Training Unit

The current training site for Xerox is located in Virginia, where the nearest airport is over an hour drive away. The cost of flying an employee to VA for training, transportation or car rental, hotel accommodations, meals and snacks daily, 20 minute phone time each day to make personal calls, and the loss of productivity to have an employee away from work, is too high. The best solution to our dilemma is to move the training site to the CSSR representatives. It will be more cost efficient to have 15 trainers to come to 4000 employees rather than vice versa. We’d prefer to keep our current trainers and offer them the positions at the new site rather than hire new trainers. This will eliminate training time and cost for the new trainers. For those trainers (ideally 15) that choose to relocate, Xerox will pay for their moving costs, hire real estate agents, and help their employees with the closing cost if they choose to buy a new home. For the rest of the trainers that decide it is not in their best interest to relocate, Xerox will give each trainer 2 month severance pay and with the help of their HR department use their contacts with local businesses to help relocate their trainers to other near by companies. We’ll also inform them about government funded programs that help employees who are out of work to receive retraining, help with their resume, and locations where they can attend computer workshops to brush up on their skills.

The time line for relocation and adjusting will be a cross between generous and seamless with the training happening simultaneously with our CSSR representatives. We offer each trainer maximum of 4 weeks to move locations. With the assistance of our real estate agents who have already scouted out houses in a variety of price ranges near the office, this time schedule should be appropriate. The next five weeks the trainers will be on site shadowing Carlos and the other mentors in training the first 50 CSSR representatives. They will learn the material and the lesson plan the mentors follow for two hours each morning. The rest of their day is dedicated to perform “Structured Observations” with CSSR representatives, interview the current mentors, and brainstorm new training material with all mentors and all 15 trainers. At the end of five weeks, the trainers should have a pretty good idea of how the training works. They will then collaborate and come up with new training lesson plans and rework their manuals to match and modify the model created by the current mentors. Ideally, the trainers should continuously bounce new ideas off of the current mentors and receive their feedback. At the conclusion of these 6 weeks, the 15 weeks training for the first group of CSSR representative should also be completed simultaneously. For the next group, the trainers will take over being the mentors and perform all the duties the original mentors did, including the weekly one-on-one sessions. The original mentors will go back to their jobs but will continue to work closely with the trainers and become the subject matter experts (SMEs).

Design Rationale

In our design solution, we would like to focus on a variety of design principles that appeal to all three approaches that we have been studying in learning.

Our first principles set of principles draw support from the behaviorist perspective. For example, it is important in our learning model to make sure that the procedural knowledge is being conveyed to the other employees. In this particular case that would be the knowledge of the process of how to answer the phone, retrieve their information on the computer database, etc. This is important because their needs to be made sure that there is a certain level of expertise at the lowest level that all customer service representatives should undertake, so by having them learn the procedural knowledge, the basic framework would be constructed. Secondly, in order for the employees to learn the material, extrinsic motivation needs to be provided. It has become common sense that giving a person extrinsic rewards, such as the cash bonuses offered by the company for the number of calls the employee solves over the phone, have been show to increase performance & motivation. In this same manner, we wish that providing them a form of this would motivate the people to learn. The last design principle that is favored heavily by behaviorists is that of positive reinforcement. In order to maximize the amount they learn it is vital that they receive positive reinforcement frequently.

Our next set of principles draws their support from the cognitive perspective. One example of such a principle comes from scaffolding, and that scaffolding the learners will be crucial to their learning of the material. One such way that this can be used is by having the callers work on real examples of previous calls. Another cognitive perspective that should be used as a design principle is the use of a mental model. Particularly it is important that the learner construct mental models of the copiers and their respective functions. Thirdly, it is also very important that we connect the learner’s knowledge that they have now, with their previous knowledge. This can be achieved by having the learners link what they know about the previous ways of answering phones and dealing with people, with the new ways that they are trying to learn. Finally, the last principle that comes from the cognitive camp is that of ensuring that there is an expert paired with each of the novices. This could be done in the same fashion as that given in the Whalen papers that dealt with Carlos & Trish.

Our third set of principles receives praise from many situative people. The most important of these principles is making sure that we use the jigsaw technique in ensuring that the people learn everything that they need to know. This way they ensure that they uphold the community learning that the company needs, and that situative people stress. Another principle is that it is vital to use teams in this learning situation, so that we not only have the people learn individually, but that they also have knowledge as a group. In many different solutions it will be common for the employee to not have the answer. However, what is important is that they have access to the team knowledge so that they can find the answer, thus, they know whom they need to talk to in order to find out more about a specific topic. This is important in a working environment, as it will raise customer satisfaction if the customer only ends up having to talk to one person, rather than being transferred. Having access to more information than one individual can actually hold plays an immense part in upholding the principle of having only one employee talk to each customer. The last two principles that should be emphasized are self-assessment and the use of real world examples. Having the employees self assess themselves is needed so that they feel in control of their outcome and their learning. In addition, having real world applications of the software will provide practical value in having them learn about the different types of problems, and will allow them to more easily transfer the knowledge over to their work setting.

Some other principles that are not very closely tied with any of these camps should also be brought into consideration. For example, in order to make sure that this solution is working, there needs to be embedded assessments throughout the training period to ensure that they are indeed learning. Another thing is that mindful learning should be emphasized, so that they are made aware that the types of questions might change over time, as well as the technology and problems that they will be handling. Also, they should be offered more control for the employees in the CasePoint software, so that the employee can manipulate and search more easily to access the information that they wish. The learning solution should also provide the learners with an opportunity to control what they would like to learn, so that they become more intrinsically motivated in learning the material, which will in turn, increase their learning.

Design Solution

In order to address the problems Xerox has with overspecialization and the call centers’ inability to address different types of issues, JTV Consulting has devised a plan to supplement all employees’ training in a way that is easily extendable to the entire 4000 staff members. “The Web” is our plan to interweave employees into work groups with whom they share knowledge. Our new team motto will be: “No call ever falls through The Web.”

The first part of The Web involves choosing an expert call representative from each of the three specialties: billing, repair, and supplies. Managers of each department will select their department’s expert representative based upon the employees’ alignment with company ideals for their position as determined by relevant call statistics like successful turnover rate, completion rate, and any other relevant statistics. These expert employees should also be people with the capacity to share their strategies, ideas, and knowledge by teaching and mentoring others. These experts will work with the managers and JTV Consulting staff to build the conceptual mental models for each specialization upon which to train the rest of the call center employees.

After the specific training methods have been outlined the training period will begin. The first call center employees to go through The Web will be the sixteen employees from each specialization with the next highest competency in their fields as determined by the same standards for picking the experts. These 48 competent employees will be assigned randomly to teams consisting of nine members, with three employees from each specialization. This random assignment may be done either by “Sorting Hat” (Harry Potter, 2000) as illustrated in Figure 1, or by drawing numbers. The main aspect of our training solution involves making everyone an essential component of a training team. Team members will work together as a whole unit helping each other throughout the eight-week training period. They will be encouraged to name their teams any way they want in order to build camaraderie, a group identity, and a sense of common goals.