|
Austar Reduces Training Time
and Cost with SupportPoint
Customer Profile Austar United Communications Limited (AUSTAR) is Australia's second largest subscription television operator, serving regional and rural households. Established in 1995, this publicly traded company also provides mobile telephone and dial-up Internet services.
AUSTAR employs over 800 people and serves over a half-million subscribers. It has invested over $1 billion to establish its technology platforms and a state-of-the-art customer service center.
The Challenge: Effective Support for Frontline Staff In 2004, AUSTAR realized that it needed to improve communications with its frontline customer service personnel. Despite receiving regular updates, staff found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the growing amount of complex product and system information. Also, staff couldn't access that information in a timely manner while on the phone to customers, hampering customer service.
"The launch of AUSTAR Digital in early 2004, and the ensuing interactive product rollouts, saw a major shift in the type of technological updates being regularly accessed by our staff," said Matthew Hill, Business Knowledge Manager at AUSTAR. "We found we'd outgrown our current systems and needed a more efficient way of distributing information to our operations center staff, sales staff and back-end staff."
At that time, AUSTAR used an in-house system to provide information on business processes, procedures and rules to national customer operations center staff. However, this system didn't allow staff to find the information they needed quickly enough in a customer service center environment.
The company also relied on email, various intranet sites, meetings and briefings to communicate with staff. Changes occur regularly in AUSTAR's business, so this approach led to many information inconsistencies provided to staff and then managed by individuals across the organization.
The Solution: SupportPoint SupportPoint is a performance support system that delivers relevant and actionable information about an organization's specific systems, processes, policies, tasks, and products. With SupportPoint, employees know the right way to work - first time and every time.
SupportPoint improves operational effectiveness by helping employees use systems and apply processes correctly. This ensures higher returns on investment in new systems, greater compliance with policies and procedures, and less rework resulting from confusion about how work is supposed to be done.
After extensive research on ways to improve information delivery and customer service, AUSTAR chose SupportPoint because it felt SupportPoint understood their business issues and could meet their needs immediately.
"The other products didn't hit the mark," said Hill. "Because they didn't fully understand the problems we had, they were trying to tailor the business to the solution rather than the other way around."
AUSTAR rolled out a six-week pilot of SupportPoint to a team of 13 staff in its national customer operations center. At the pilot's conclusion, a survey revealed that staff were uniformly positive and enthusiastic in their responses to the product. So, AUSTAR rolled out SupportPoint to its customer service team of 320 people.
The Results: Effective Change Management with Knowledge Management "What we wanted to do with SupportPoint, and what we've achieved, even at this early stage, is to manage change as a business norm," Hill added. "This means staff understand that change is a constant and will continue to happen. It's an enormous cultural shift, but having the right tools and presenting the right information in the right way increases the readiness for and acceptance of change."
"We've eliminated inconsistencies in information management," said Hill. "SupportPoint acts as a security blanket for frontline staff. They've said goodbye to the folders on their desks and now know that if they need information, it will be in SupportPoint."
"SupportPoint gives us the ability to manage training a lot more effectively and to better support the business, particularly around business changes"said Hill.
The Results: Reduced Training Time Training a customer service specialist used to take eight weeks of classroom and on-the-job training. In January 2005 AUSTAR trialled SupportPoint to help train a new team. The company immediately saw a one-week reduction in training times. It expects that by rewriting the training program to focus more heavily on SupportPoint, a three-week reduction could be achieved.
"We train about 80 new staff members a year," said Hill. "Reducing their training time represents an enormous cost saving for AUSTAR."
The Results: Fewer Help Desk Calls AUSTAR has two specialist teams to support its customer service staff. The first is Rescue Squad, a team that deals with more complicated calls that can't be handled by normal staff. By using SupportPoint to bring staff up to speed faster on business changes or new systems, the company experienced a significant reduction in Rescue Squad calls. All staff now have up-to-date information at hand, increasing self-reliance in answering calls.
The second specialist group is the Support Escalation Team, which operates like a help desk for customer service staff. AUSTAR predicts a 20 per cent reduction in calls to this team, which will not only reduce costs but also ensure better customer service through reduced call times and more knowledgeable staff.
"The level of post-training and on-the-job support required previously is now unnecessary," said Hill. "SupportPoint gives staff the confidence to help themselves."
Panviva: Developers of SupportPoint
Panviva’s performance support system, SupportPoint, is a knowledge base solution that provides fast, targeted access to structured documentation about systems, processes, and products. SupportPoint improves adoption of applications and processes, while reducing training and support costs.
Organizations with complex processes and systems use SupportPoint to offer self-service support that builds know-how at the moment-of-need. SupportPoint delivers structured, up to date, and personalized content that gives users rapid access to just the information they need to complete the task correctly. Globally, more than 50,000 users rely on SupportPoint across a broad range of industries to reduce processing errors, strengthen compliance, and increases customer service levels.
|
 |
Try SupportPoint Viewer online now.
|
|
|
