Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 62)

GLOBAL LEARNING AWARD • GOLD Marianne Langlois Vice President, Learning Solutions, Convergys Corp. As a relationship management solutions provider, Convergys Corp.’s customer service is a key driver of future success. But as a global company with nearly 75,000 employees worldwide, the company has to apply that same commitment to internal support services. Contact-center agents are the key to success on both fronts. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Convergys delivers outsourced customer management and human resource management solutions to clients in 35 languages from its 84 global contact centers in the United States, Europe, India, the Philippines and Latin America. In most regions, the contact-center agents are working in multiple languages or languages not local to their regions. When dealing with customers, agents face challenges with rapid research and development cycles, integrated functionality and multiple product dimensions that require deep product knowledge. When dealing with employees, agents struggle to keep track of compensation, beneﬁts and HR administration programs, which can be broad and varied. Adding further complication, customer and employee training content and processes may differ by region due to regulatory and compliance requirements or cultural norms. Recognizing these challenges, Marianne Langlois, vice president of learning solutions at Convergys, led a team of 100 global Convergys employees in developing a business case for communications and culture training aimed to drive improved agent capability and effectiveness. “As the result of several business wins globally, we needed to ﬁnd a way to take the learning approaches that had driven successful business results for our clients and to scale them more quickly,” Langlois said. “The technology advances in content development tools over the past few years, our experience in developing performance-based solutions and our strong global talent pool helped us to achieve our goals in building out our global curriculum.” Implemented in 2007 and the ﬁrst quarter of 2008, the global curriculum focused on new-hire training for agents in three key aspects: Convergys processes and technologies, customer processes and products, and communications and culture of the customer or employee populations served. The redesigned HR management global curriculum features a global module to provide an overview of tools, policies and procedures. A country-speciﬁc module provides an overview of each country and training on applicable HR support processes. A clientspeciﬁc module provides training on service-center tools; client and country-speciﬁc HR policies; and client and country-speciﬁc HR administration issues. The initiative also transformed communications and culture training programs into a performance-based communication and customer-service training program. This new approach provides training in a real-world context and features a revised curriculum that maps to tasks performed during an actual call life cycle. It also provides a blended learning approach, delivers coaching and supports evaluation. As a result, the standardization of training content and delivery worldwide has resulted in improved efﬁciency and effectiveness. The new curriculum also allowed for ﬂexibility in training delivery, ensuring the ability to customize training to a region or client. The transformation has reduced training length by 33 percent and generated more than $1 million in operational savings. Convergys clients also have beneﬁted from agents who are trained faster, provide higher-quality service and are more responsive to customer needs. A key ﬁnancial services client saw agent graduation rates increase by 11.5 percent, topping 85 percent, with a one-week reduction in training time. “While the initial work was done within one of our business units to support their new business wins, we quickly saw the synergies of leveraging that same framework and process to our other business units,” Langlois said. “We are in the process of applying the right mix of learning technology, process and content development expertise across the company, both internally and externally to our clients to create new efﬁciencies and drive improved performance.” – Mike Prokopeak 62

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

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