CRM and ERP News

Since I took the role of being head of both the training and quality department, I realized that I spent more time on getting training plans in place.  I had to work with my managers to book all training classes for next year, hoping it would only take an hour or so.  To my surprise, with the constant changes in ramp schedules due to attrition plus recurrent training for the accounts in the organization, it was almost a full time job.

It isn’t easy trying to fit the client’s training schedule requests, especially if there a lot of restrictions around contracts, IT requirements, room layouts, and required schedules due to the availability of trainers or applications.  Can you imagine juggling multiple clients with different sites to get all classes in house?  It’s a nightmare!

That is just the tip of the iceberg --- room utilization.

Call centers are found in every nook in the world and having to find Bhutan makes me happy that the industry is expanding.

Bhutanese students are selected to undergo call center training in India every year.  They go through language courses focusing on grammar, pronunciation, and accent neutralization.  As expected, they go through the same geography lessons that one has to learn when working in an outsourced center.  Once they graduate, some have returned to India to pursue a call center career.  Some are known to work when they are on vacation. Like any other job, some never go back stating that there was no time for personal activities due to its working environment.

I can sense that you’re been wondering where Bhutan is located.  The kingdom is situated in between China and India.  It is one of the most isolated nations in the world and considered as one of the places to find the Himalayan Buddhist culture.

I looked at this piece of furniture that is being marketed as the next best thing for call center managers.  It’s called the Traveler Mobile Desk from Interior Concepts.  It’s pretty nifty but it took me some time to visualize having this desk in a call center environment.

If we consider having supervisors use this, it’s a bit funny and awkward to see them lagging the desk to go to agents and work at their stations.  So, however hard I try, I can only see this in a training environment.

A training room has to be flexible and layouts shouldn’t be the typical classroom set-up.  There are situations when you need to share your room with 2 different clients and they would have different requirements.  This poses a problem.  Another one would be getting a lot of PCs in the room due to the size of the class, yet there are only a number of sockets available, ending up with wires all over the place.  This is a horrendous sight!