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.

Figure 1 – Sorting Hat

During training, teams will be seated in a manner that encourages knowledge sharing with neighbors. This may include seating employees at a round table with nine chairs and small flat- panel LCD monitors at every chair. To ensure the most knowledge is shared, we recommend that each representative be seated next to each different specialization in a rotation as shown in Figure 2. This setup would be desirable since each representative could be a quick reference to easily share information or make recommendations to the employees next to him or her. We also recommend a seat rotation every two weeks during training to seat employees next to different teammates. This would encourage more knowledge sharing and would also ensure that the weakest teammates in certain areas would be seated next to the strongest teammates in certain areas at least once.

For the first day of The Web, the expert and manager from each of the specializations will work with each team to train them all according to the mental model from the expert. The first day of the training will take all day and will consist of watching the expert’s modeling, lectures, mock calls, and watching video tapes of themselves answering calls. The second day, training will be also be split into thirds, with the teammates from each specialization training their teammates in a jigsaw-style training session. This will help them think about how they do their work and will enable them to pass their knowledge to their teammates. On the third day of training, teams will develop a plan for how to attack the problem of having three jobs at the same time. They will talk about the likely difficulties and will develop a schema for answering calls in the most effective way. We would suggest a redesign of the call center databases to ease this schema but databases are not JTV Consulting’s specialty so we leave it up to Xerox to solve this problem.

The remainder of the eight-week training will take place during the first two hours of every work day and will include activities such as self-assessment of the group’s cohesiveness and effectiveness, detailing specific products, going over a list of trouble calls kept by group members, receiving feedback from technicians or other personnel affected by their calls, answering other teams’ Challenge Calls (details later), team building, and one-on-one performance reviews with the expert representative. During the non-training hours of the entire training period, the expert representative will move among the teams, make suggestions, and be a reference and support for representatives responding to calls. Thus, in addition to trainees’ teammates, the experts will be constant supports for employees who are rebuilding their understanding of how to do their jobs as well as those who are just learning how to do a new job. An enjoyable and constructive component of The Web will be teams’ Challenge Calls. Teammates will spend a portion of each training morning coming up with calls to “stump” other teams. These calls will be placed to a rival team member by a confederate team member and will be a problem call or a complicated call. The receiving team and the calling team will then rate the receiving team’s performance and the managers and JTV Consulting will track performance. Teams’ performance on these calls may be included as a component in any competitions Xerox wishes to encourage.

Towards the end of the training period, teams will take part in a performance competition. At the beginning of the training period, all teams will determine together what the final prize will be and managers will approve any reasonable prize. At the end of training, each team will be evaluated by managers on their performance on the Challenge Calls, on oral exams of their abilities to answer calls effectively, and on their history of performance on actual calls. The team with the best composite scores will win the prize! Figure 2 – The Web

Scaling Up The Web will be a viable solution for Xerox only if it can be scaled up to train the entire call center staff. The first step in creating a solution to train the entire staff will be to move the trainers from the Virginia facility to Xerox headquarters where the call center representatives will be working. This will ensure that the trainers will learn the methods of The Web and will be able to apply their learning and education expertise to the retraining process. We expect that at least 15 trainers will accept the offer to move to headquarters and will become proficient in the training process. Although these corporate trainers will not begin training staff until the second round of The Web, they will participate in a few weeks of training at the beginning of the process and will actually participate. They will answer calls and go through all the other steps of training so that they truly know what the job entails and can identify better with the employees they will be retraining. Towards the end of or after the first round of training, these trainers will meet together with the specialization experts and talk about The Web and work out a plan for how to implement training on the other 3949 staff members.

After the first 48 staff members have been trained and our assessments (see below) have confirmed that The Web was effective, the second round of training will begin. This round will continue as before except that the three expert staff people will go back to work as usual and the trainers will take their place. Each trainer will now have a role of facilitator and their job will be to enable the flow of information between call center representatives to go smoothly. If it turns out that trainers are not completely ready to be mentors and experts, they may want to use the expert representatives or other skilled call center employees to model procedures for trainees but the trainers will still serve as facilitators during the training process. During the scaled-up retraining process, each trainer will probably take between 50 and 125 staff members into his or her group and will be in charge of their entire training. Since this is the case, we expect that the entire 4000 call center employees will be effectively retrained in less than one year.

Once more staff members take part in this training, it is certainly going to be the case that some trainees are not ready to graduate into the regular workplace. Since we expect that all trainees are capable of becoming successful call center representatives, we will need to motivate trainees to learn thoroughly and give them reason to want to successfully complete the training. First of all, trainees will be supported by peer pressure and desire to perform well in their team. If their calling ratings and methods are not up to par, it is likely that team members will point it out and help them work on it during retraining. Secondly, we can provide some sort of extrinsic motivation to all staff members who complete training. Since their job is really a new job and their responsibilities are greater, we believe that changing the job title for retrained graduates from “call center representative” to “Xerox Representative” will give them the feeling of being in a more prestigious position. Also, upon graduation these Xerox Representatives will also be eligible for a new performance-based level system. The management will probably like to have more say in exactly how to implement such a leveling system but we recommend that staff earn their way into different levels with a variety of perks by having positive performance reviews. The goal of such an incentive system is to give staff who have been working extra hard for the company the feeling that their efforts are noticed and appreciated. Levels may be something like Silver, Gold, and Platinum and reflect higher customer service ratings. Perks associated with these levels may include close parking spots, occasional free lunches or banquets, cash or gift certificate bonuses, a plaque for their cubicle wall, a company polo shirt, and any number of other incentives.

There is a different number of staff members from each specialization going through retraining so at some point there will be no more Billing employees to train but there will be plenty more Repair employees to train. When we can no longer have the equal distribution of staff members at each of the round tables, we will seat call-center graduates at the round tables during the working portion of the day. This will ensure that every trainee is still seated next to someone with skills in each specialization. In fact, the corporate trainers may wish to implement this mix of graduates and trainees throughout other portions of training, as well, if it appears that these graduates are sharing important knowledge with their teams. Assessment We will evaluate the Design Solution’s success with a variety of assessments. Ascertaining the results of the following factors will allow us to measure the validity of the Design Solution. The current call routing system, the Automated Call Distribution (ACD), collects and tabulates data on each call routed per employee. It also allows the caller to enter in his/her ID number so that the CSSR representative knows name and history of the each caller before they answer the call. This allows them to answer each call with a personal touch (thanks for the idea Kevin and Chika). The ACD provides specific information such as, did the caller request information on Repair, Supplies, or Billing. Moreover, the ACD will time the duration of each call, count the number of calls, and answer if the customer service representative presented a successful solution to the customer. Lastly, the satisfaction rate of the customer can be captured on a scale of one to nine. Before hanging up, the customer is asked the following confidential questions by a voice operated system: 1. If they were satisfied with the service received 2. Did they feel that the customer representative was knowledgeable 3. Did you receive friendly service? The customer presses a corresponding number on their touch tone telephone from 1 (poor, no) to 9 (excellent, yes) to confirm their responses.

Using this data, we hope to analyze the success of the Design Solution by individually assessing each customer representative’s growth rate. During the 15-week period, every customer service representative will meet weekly for one hour with Shanaya, Carlos, or Huri to discuss his/her progress. During their meeting they will be shown their statistics from the ACD printout, and also shown video clips of themselves on customer service calls. In addition to videos of themselves, they will be shown simulated videos of others on similar trouble shooting calls. During the hour the customer service representative will receive feedback on their progress, suggestions for improvement, different ideas or thoughts on handling irate callers, and quick reference guides for backup. Also, during each meeting the expert and the novice will together create and add on the customer representative’s mental model of how Xerox, the three departments (Repair, Supplies, Billing), and his/her role come to play. Each week, depending on the additional knowledge and experience gained, the customer representative will be empowered to see the larger picture. At the end of each hour the most important question will be addressed to the customer service representative, “Do they feel the Design Solution is successful impacting their knowledge, learning, skill and motivation to continue to improve?” The result of this question is of high importance, because it’s vital to have customer representatives “buy in” for the Design Solution and for them to see the benefits.

Cost/Benefit Analysis The greatest benefits that result from our implementation come from 2 main areas. First, we will cut costs by closing the Virginia training site, as we will no longer need to train them at that site, but will instead have the facilitators travel to the sites themselves. This will reduce the operating costs of the company, as there will no longer be these heavy ongoing expenses associated with the maintenance of that facility. Second, employees will become 2 or 3 times more efficient since they will no longer be skilled in only one specialization. These representatives will also be motivated to work more diligently because of the promise of performance-based rewards. This will also reduce costs, as they will be able to be more efficient with the workforce that they maintain, causing them to need less people. In addition, by having such a good workforce, we will cut the need for service technicians, as many of the problems that previously required service technicians to fix, will now be fixed over the phone instead. Moreover, the costs that we have will be minimal. The only costs we have as a result of this training will be the price of rewards like lunches and possibly monetary bonuses for the service representatives, and the time and resources to train the trainers on how to do staff training. The last small cost is that of the trainers having to be relocated to each of the Xerox locations. Although one would think that the amount of time that the workers are in training might be another cost, the time spent away from the phone will not be significant, compared to the other more costly training plans. This is because since most of their curriculum will be set with them taking calls instead of being in didactic training, they will be able to work while they are learning, which reduces this loss of work cost greatly.