Pilots are important not only because they prove the vendor's capability of delivering quality service but also a successful pilot is a gateway for additional business. A few months ago I was responsible for the operational success of two simultaneous pilots - a 12 FTE back office for UK BFSI client and the other a 25 FTE pilot for the same client for their US geography. This experience taught me several important lessons, which I've tried to summarize below.
1. PLANNING -Plan carefully, keeping everyone effected in the loop, for example a common cause of delays in go-live is that system accesses for the agents have not been set up well in time. Or that 2 months down the line the legacy system was to be scrapped and here we go with the training once again. Ensure availability of key staff (i.e. consider leaves, attrition, backup) such as - Operation Managers, Trainers, team leaders well in advance. unavailability of trainers or back up trainers affects the knowledge transfer process significantly.
2. FIX PROBLEMS WITH WORK FLOW - Try as much as possible to fix problems with process design before starting the pilot. Most often as a TP vendor we accept and implement the process as is given by the client without first doing a workflow risk analysis. And we did the same with our pilot as well. What it taught us was that its far easier and less strenuous (on the team) to at least fix major and easily identifiable issues with the process before hand. In my case the process that was piloted was a 100% paper based process onshore which was to be converted to 100% paperless process offshore. The clients altered their process design to be implemented as paperless offshore but did not consult us (the vendor) and given the issues that we faced during and post implementation, it was clear that the process lacked understanding of a paperless environment and process dependencies and assumptions made (but not validated) were far from ground realties.
And believe me its a nightmare when the pilot has gone live, you are not hittin the SLAs, and you are not able to stop and make the changes offshore because at the client’s end the staff have been let go and there’s no one to take the load. Something that could help in this scenario is for the TP vendor to conduct a workflow risk analysis to pick out key issues.
3. PEOPLE - Usually the team selected for the pilot by the Third Party vendor comprises of some of the best and experienced agents, when the pilot is signed off and FTE numbers increased the initial quality of people is diluted because most of them (or the best of them) are given support roles – team leader, coach, quality agents etc, attrition and the usual problems (leave management, performance issues) faced in a contact center kicks in.
However if you do not set up the initial team with appropriate experience and skill levels then the pilot has much lesser chance of success. Three key roles which should have strong candidates are – Trainer, for the initial knowledge transfer; Team Leader, especially if it’s a small team and just one or two team leaders are required and an experienced Operations Manager who can set the right expectations with the client fom the word 'go'.
4. TRAINING - This is the most important aspect from a knowledge transfer point of view. Ensure that you have a trainer with the appropriate skills and exp. for the task. That there is a back up for that trainer. The training material provided by the client is reviewed by the training team before the training starts; the reason for this is that sometimes the clients do not have any training material or if they do have it has all text with inadequte visuals such as flow charts, diagrams etc, e.g. its difficult for someone in India to understand what is a 2 seater coupe without seeing picture of it.
These are some of the things I experienced, however if you do have anything to contribute please do so by adding your comments
