The challenge

A highly diversified financial services group offering insurance, banking, and investment products and services needed to scale up customer service quickly. Even modest and temporary erosion of its admirable satisfaction ratings was unacceptable.

Onboarding and training a large group of new hires on an accelerated timetable required a disciplined, thoughtful strategy to ensure associates fully understood their role, the vital importance of compliance, and their performance’s direct result on member satisfaction (MSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Our solution

TTEC created a new-hire curriculum incorporating a proprietary call flow that extended throughout the employee’s tenure at the company. This Mission Critical Call Flow is a roadmap to guide the conversation associates have with customers. Unlike a preset script, it’s flexible, promotes use of soft skills, and also serves as a coaching roadmap for team leaders.

To ensure new hires’ understanding and adoption of learning materials, TTEC built testing milestones to gauge progress and address any gaps that surfaced. Role-playing exercises provided trainees with real-world interaction experience so they could practice and perfect new skills they learned before taking live calls with members.

TTEC’s Empower tool provided the framework for a customized Coaching Action Plan (CAP) to ensure consistent messaging about performance expectations to 1,500 new associates supporting voice, email, and chat channels.

The results

While boosting a workforce by 1,500 associates typically degrades certain key performance indicators (KPIs) — even if only temporarily — KPIs were maintained at targeted levels. The client awarded TTEC “Green Scorecards” for more than 20 consecutive months, signifying that TTEC consistently met or exceeded eight specific KPIs established by the Fortune 100 company, including MSAT, NPS, and compliance.

TTEC maintained a 92% MSAT score while at the same time achieved a 97.8% compliance rate by creating a culture of compliance through quarterly courses delivered through TTEC University and reinforced by pay-for-performance incentive programs.

Speed to proficiency was another big win: new hires mastered training materials so quickly that they achieved MSAT targets in 60 days, three times faster than the 180-day timeframe expected to hit MSAT targets.