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NICE Helps Mobistar Turn Customer Service Agents into Stars

An interview with Isabelle De Brock, Head of Coaching, Mobistar Belgium

Can describe your contact center environment?

In the contact centers we handle about 8,000-12,000 business and residential customer calls per day, that's about 2.85 to 3 million calls per year. Customers call us about a wide variety of topics, really on almost everything within the scope of telecom service, including technical customer support, handsets, invoices, coverage, or more information on promotions.

Can you describe the Mobistar approach to QM and improving agents' skill-sets?

At Mobistar our philosophy is driven by coaching, not by evaluation - which is quite different than the traditional approach to QM. We do not evaluate our agents. Evaluation is evaluation, but coaching is evolution. These are two totally different concepts. With evaluation there are borders; which means to the agent that if they're not performing they can lose their bonus, for example.

At Mobistar we focus on what we call "SKAP" - where the purpose of coaching is to enhance Skills, Knowledge, and Attitude, in order to get better Performance. Our coaches are responsible for the evolution of the agent, by monitoring agent interactions with customers and then conducting coaching feedback sessions.

We have developed several processes and forums to enable agent evolution, for example - a "coaching island". This is an area that is used by three agents and one coach. In this scenario, an agent also becomes a coach, and the coach can function as an agent. The coach will get a real call, and the agent will monitor him. Then they discuss the call, and positions are switched.

Agents also have access to coaches via an intranet "Coaching Community"; and an agent might come to the coaching caf? to find a coach for assistance; or call a special number whenever they want to talk about a certain topic or problem.

Basically, an evaluation can teach an agent about "the ingredients of a cake", but a coach will be the one who can see how the "agent bakes the cake", and will be the primary source of evolutionary guidance.

How has NICE helped you achieving your coaching goals?

We view the NICE solution as a coaching tool. With NICE you can understand the agent's performance and competence not only from a technical point of view, that is - knowledge of products and services, but overall competence delivering the highest quality of service to our customers.

Before NICE, we did "side-by-side" and "listening-in" quality checks. But with these approaches you are limited. For example with listening in, you don't know what's going on on the agent's screen. If you do side-by-side you can't playback the call later. With NICE we have all of this, and it's documented too.

With NICE we have the call readily available to play whenever we want, we can rewind, we can correlate it to screen activity and see if they're following the proper script, and so forth.

Because everything is documented, "No I didn't do that" is not an issue any more. It makes life a lot easier for coaches and for agents.

Can you describe the implementation process of the NICE solution at Mobistar - what kind of steps did NICE go through in terms of helping you get started?

When we decided to go with NICE, we also wanted to benefit from the complete Implementation Program from NICE's Customer Education Services team, which demonstrated a deep understanding of contact center processes, needs, challenges and operation. They came in to define with us our business objectives in terms of coaching, assess our processes at many levels of the organization, including QA, support and operations, and drill down to specific needs and objectives, to help us design specific processes for more efficient coaching and ultimately helping our agents evolve into better performers.

During the first visit, for example, they conducted a Pre-Installation Survey and preliminary training and consultations. They were very thorough and investigated the existing methods we used for coaching and helped us determine which coaching forms and reports to develop.

The whole process was very smooth. What was especially important is that they started the communication beforehand. The unions were informed in advance, and NICE got together with the relevant people who were interested in the system. We got a lot of good reactions, and the word got out.

What have been some of the results that you have seen since implementing NICE?

The NICE solution has helped improve agent job satisfaction in terms of getting the kind of coaching that we look to give them. Agents even ask us to have one of those coaching sessions, this didn't used to happen. Agents see the advantage of the system for them. It has helped with all sorts of performance parameters, such as communication skills - including introduction, greeting, and the closing of the conversation, application knowledge, everything really.

NICE's Professional Services: Implementation and Education

By providing a full spectrum of training and advisory services, NICE's Professional Services team partners with customers to assist with the development, integration and management of the NICE solution in their organization.

Program content addresses the varied needs of different target audiences involved in the implementation and operation of the NICE solution: supervisors and team leaders, agents, technical and operational administrators, quality specialists and managers.

The different programs enable users to maximize the benefits of the installed technology, accelerate ROI's, focus on desirable outcomes, and deliver tangible and measurable results.

For more information contact: info@nice.com.

The Power of Integrated Coaching with NICE Perform
  • Targeted tools for improving agent performance
  • Input derived from a variety of sources, such as recorded calls, interaction and speech analytics reports, evaluations, customer feedback on interactions, off-line files with information on new campaigns and procedures,
  • Agents can independently review coaching packages, send comments to supervisors, and re-visit information whenever needed
  • No need to wait until the entire team's schedules coincide, nor to repeat group sessions on a one-to-one basis
  • Provides a constant flow of information and on-going, open dialogue between supervisor and agent
  • Empowers and engages the agent
  • Maximizes performance and quality of service

Hundreds of telco companies around the world are using NICE to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction, including:
  • Orange: UK, Switzerland, Slovakia, Belgium (Mobistar)
  • TMobile: Holland, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary
  • Vodafone: South Africa, Greece, Portugal, many throughout Eastern Europe
  • Israel: Hutchinson, Pelephone, Cellcom
  • UK: BT Cellnet, British Telecom
  • China: Sichuan China Mobile Communication Corporation, Sichuan China Telecom
  • US: Nextel, US Cellular, Dobson Cellular, Sprint
 
Company Snapshot
Founded in 1996 as part of the Orange SA group, Mobistar is Belgium's leading mobile telecommunications operator, with approximately 1,700 full-time equivalent employees an estimated base of 2.886.739 (September 2005) active customers.
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