The Call Center School
The Call Center School's (TCCS) mission is to equip call center professionals with the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for successful performance on the job. To foster this professional development, TCCS provides standard educational programs on a variety of call center topics, customized education programs for call centers and industry vendors, and general call center consulting.
Penny Reynolds, one of the founding partners at TCCS, is responsible for overseeing curriculum development, in addition to teaching many of their classes. Since the school’s inception, Reynolds and her partners have offered traditional classroom training on a variety of call center topics. Reynolds, however, wanted to offer a more comprehensive training solution via the Internet. She believed that offering e-learning programs, or webinars, to train call center frontline staff, supervisors, and management on call center operations would enhance the courses currently offered in a classroom setting.
As Reynolds began researching companies that could provide the audio and web conferencing services that TCCS required, she created a set of criteria that guided TCCS in selecting a service partner. She needed a provider that could:
- Manage the conferencing technology, webinar registration and maintenance
- Offer technology that would be seamless to both The Call Center School staff and participants
- Make the webinar experience an easy and comfortable one for attendees
- Provide information to attendees in advance of the training
- Handle all “call maintenance” activities.
- Offer outstanding customer support whenever her team required it
After evaluating four providers over a two month period, The Call Center School selected Encounter Collaborative to provide TCCS's audio conferencing and web conferencing services . “There are a number of reasons we selected Encounter—from the range of services the company offered to its outstanding customer support. We needed a partner that could take the ball and run with it,” Reynolds explained. “With our previous provider, most of the responsibility in preparing for a webinar was on our end—and doing that is not our core competence.”
Encounter’s integrated webinar delivery system (known as Encounter Event Conferencing Services) allowed TCCS to focus on their core competencies and avoid undue amounts of time on meeting planning.
Given this, Reynolds and her team developed award winning products and delivered them at a price point that is hard to ignore, including one flat fee per connection for a 90-minute webinar, allowing customers to have multiple attendees in a remote training room setting, while using only one data and one voice connection.
“Many of our customers are searching for cost-effective solutions for their training needs and many of them have over twenty students who attend these sessions in a training room with a projection unit and a speakerphone. For 20 students this represents a cost of less than $12.00 per person for a 90-minute session – and no travel or lost opportunity costs either,” Reynolds said.
Based on its popularity, the web seminar curriculum has expanded from 26 topics to over 50 topics. The company is pleased with its expanded curriculum and increased exposure within the training community. You can learn more about The Call Center School and their 2004 Product of the Year award by visiting www.thecallcenterschool.com.
