The challenge

A leading financial services firm needed to quickly ramp up and streamline customer support for a new credit card program that it was launching with a major retailer. Anticipating a significant surge in customer service inquiries from new cardholders, the financial services firm was looking to engage a trusted partner that could recruit, train, and manage hundreds of associates rapidly and efficiently.

The client’s business model included offering credit cards to businesses as a branded card for use by their customers, particularly for sectors such as doctors, chiropractors, veterinarians and dentists. With sales targets being missed, the organization needed to establish a more efficient and effective pipeline management capability. This service would span the entire product lifecycle, from initial outreach through on-boarding of customers, training of merchants, and ongoing delivery of information to card holders or managers.

Our solution

TTEC deployed a nimble, experienced team to manage the ramp-up from recruiting and hiring to onboarding and training more than 400 associates in a new contact center location. We began by putting in place a dedicated leadership team to expedite the associate onboarding process. More than 40 managers were “frontloaded” with extensive training and nesting in a client facility to enable them to provide maximum associate support.

Leaders and other support staff participated in weekly team meetings and knowledge checks, as well as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” exercise where associates selected a topic or area that they wanted to focus on from the curriculum.

We also launched a “Community of Learning” pilot to give associates an opportunity to build up their skills through peer learning/feedback and accelerate overall readiness by identifying broader knowledge gaps that needed to be addressed. Associates enhanced their knowledge with refresher courses, daily team huddles, and twice-weekly calls with leadership.

The results

Within six months, more than 400 associates were equipped with everything they needed to provide expert support. TTEC’s speed to proficiency has been recognized by the client several times, not only because we quickly ramped a new location of 400+ FTEs, but because we have been value-added partners during customer transitions to the new credit card and because of our strong process improvement-driven culture. In fact, the client has recognized as a best practice TTEC’s front loading of our management staff prior to onboarding any associates.

The comprehensive onboarding and training that associates received led to excellent results that exceeded client expectations. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) reached an 80+ score compared to a goal of 75, and TTEC’s NPS performance was ranked #1 out of all the sites that were providing surge/transition support.

Our efficiency, both in preventing call backs through first call resolution (FCR) and handle time has also been recognized by the client. Ninety days after ramp, we were recognized as being the best performing site with the lowest non-productive call time of any same contact supporting site (50 seconds versus an environment average of 75 seconds), which has led to lower handle time overall. Our call back rate from the same customer is 7.5% against a client expectation of 10%.

Quality performance to regulatory adherence has also been best-in-class since launch. We are currently 100% compliant in this metric. When the first series of results returned, the client remarked, “they couldn’t believe it” and that “such performance was unprecedented.”