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KE: I am excited today to be speaking with Donna Schulze-Gullett. Donna is a senior learning professional who has been providing learning solutions to Fortune 500 companies over the past 12 years. She is currently Director of TeleTech University at TeleTech Holdings Inc. where, over the past year, she has implemented the GeoLearning LMS platform supporting blending learning programs to 50 sites in 15 countries around the globe. Her past employers include PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, and Martin Marietta. Donna holds a B.S. in Education from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Management and Supervision from Central Michigan University, and is certified at the CFPIM level with APICS, The Association for Operations Management. Donna, why don´t we start by having you give us a brief overview of your business?
DS: Normally what I tell people is, "You probably haven´t heard of TeleTech, but I bet you´ve talked to us." Teletech is a customer management business process outsourcer and we answer the phones for a lot of big companies. If you have a cell phone, if you have a bank account, if you have a credit card and you have called that 800 number on your statement, it is likely you will have actually talked to a TeleTech employee. TeleTech provides front and back office customer management services to strengthen the world´s leading brands by leveraging world-class operations across our strategic platforms.
We provide both front office and back office and we can provide complete delivery of the customer management solution, so we can present a solution that includes the actual agents that answer the phones. If a company decides that they would prefer to keep their own call centers, we provide all of the software and best business practices to help them get started, and that is our on-demand solution as well. We have been in the business for over 20 years. We became public in 1996. We are a billion dollar operation, and we service six of the top Fortune 10 companies. We are really focused on large global clients and we have over 150 global clients around the world. Our verticals include financial services, the healthcare industry, a lot of healthcare insurance companies, communications and media (commercial and government), and automotive.
KE: Donna, can you tell us a little bit about the learning challenges associated with having 36,000 employees, speaking several different languages?
DS: We are located in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. We also have operations in Europe, Spain and the UK. Our offices in Asia include India, Singapore, China, and Hong Kong, and we are also looking at Shanghai. We are in the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.
We do have some challenges being that far around the globe and it has been quite an interesting experience implementing an Internet solution around the globe, but it has its advantages too. With the tools that we have available to us, very much like you are dialing in today for the Reality HR series, we use a very similar tool to communicate, on an on-going basis around the world, to all of our students and administrators. If you think about my organization and the group of people that I mentor around the globe, it is really the training organization, so training coordinators, training managers, those are the people that I stay in very close contact with. We are looking at multiple languages. Our initial implementation was in English and most recently, we brought in Spanish. We are also looking at Portuguese and traditional Chinese; and if we do go on to mainland China, we will be looking at simplified Chinese as well, so those are the languages that we currently are working with right now.
KE: Donna, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the business need that led to your organization´s decision to implement a learning management system.
DS: One of the things that I found nice about TeleTech was that the top leaders of the company had a very definite human capital vision and model in mind. Now, if you think about TeleTech - What is our product? Our product is really people, people answering the phone for very large companies. Human capital is very important to us and this is the model that we had coming in and the vision that we would take from the very beginning as we are recruiting that we would recruit the best talent, people with the right competencies and skill sets and bring those in to be part of the organization coming first to TeleTech University. Within the learning services organization, we have TeleTech University and all of the training that a new hire gets when they come through TeleTech University helps them come on board.
We focus on blended learning solutions. We incorporate several elements including classroom training, e-learning, coaching and performance rewards that we call ´optimum rewards´. So, what are optimum rewards? At TeleTech, we are a very performance-based company. So, once people are through the trainings, they have very definite goals set for them and they are rewarded when they hit those goals. It is a very nice program; we are able to give our agents and supervisors the ability to see from a day-to-day standpoint how they are hitting their goals. They have tools available to them where they can see if they are handling calls correctly, if they are handling them timely. Those are the things that are important in our industry and people are rewarded based upon that. The G&A folks have their own set of goals and are rewarded based upon hitting those goals as well. We look at the ongoing career growth, so we have a talent management organization that looks at the long-term life of the employee and where they may plan to move on in their careers as they stay with TeleTech.
KE: It is nice to see emphasis in the transfer of learning and application back on the job through these performance incentives. What did learning look like before you implement the LMS?
DS: The learning was primarily instructor-led, classroom.
KE: It sounds like some pretty radical shifts occurred when you did implement the LMS. Give us just a brief understanding of what training looks like now.
DS: We are really focused on the blended model; it is accessed through the Internet, and we actually have two different types of accounts. We have the accounts for the students and then we have a second type of account for administrators. The students sign on, they can see their course status, they can take e-learning, they can collect feedback, they can access their student transcripts, and they can print their certificates of completion. The administrators are those people in the training organization that assign training, monitor the training, and run a lot of reports. We administer all of TeleTech University in English so that is our common link around the globe. All of the administrators can communicate to each other, but we are able to collect all of the data for the different languages in one set of standard reports. We also have the capability of tailoring reports, we have that type of functionality within TeleTech University, and we can set our profiles to match our user settings.
KE: You mentioned to me earlier your emphasis on speed-to-performance. I am wondering, does TeleTech University has some objectives around creating that measurable speed-to-performance?
DS: Absolutely. This is our mission statement - TeleTech University provides measurable speed-to-performance. It seems like every day someone is requesting another favor from TeleTech University. I always go back to, is it going to really give us measurable speed-to-performance if we take on that objective? The focus is on producing motivated high performers quickly.
How do we achieve measurable speed-to-performance? The key is our blended learning. I really can´t say enough about the blend and how it has provided us a faster model of training people. We´ve been able to compress most of our programs that were completely instructor led from say, three weeks to two weeks, an average of 33% compression. The ROI on that reduction in training time is phenomenal, given that we have thousands of employees receiving ongoing training and are continually training new hires because of turnover. We use high quality e-learning courses, which produce the consistent lessons throughout the enterprise and then we use the classroom instruction for mentoring and fine-tuning. One other thing that we are finding as a byproduct of the blended learning is that our students are feeling very confident. They know they can continually go back and review their e-learning materials as needed. Also, this confidence is making them happier. So, people are happy and confident in their jobs, which is translating into higher retention. That is another goal that we have, especially in the call center industry, to have greater retention rates.
Also, from an administration point of view, being able to measure through a single database has been important for us. In the past, we had anywhere from Excel spreadsheets to an informal LMS system or home grown LMS system that we had in one country. Now, we are all together in one single database and the reporting capabilities have just been wonderful. We provide online testing with immediate scoring and the ability to be able to get to that and to know exactly what learners have completed which courses, and be able to demonstrate that to our customers as well, has just been a very big benefit to us.
KE: In terms of the e-learning content that you are providing, how much of it is created by yourselves versus licensed through a third party?
DS: That is a very good question. Actually, the e-learning content for our agents and for our supervisors is 100% homegrown. We have created in the past year 24 courses for agents along with quite a few product courses as well. A lot of our larger clients have asked us to create product training in an e-learning format. We are creating that currently with a team of about 30 people in our e-learning development organization. In fact, we are going to market with our e-learning, so if a customer comes to us and says, "We really don´t want your agents but we want your processes," we can sell them the training we´ve created.
As far as the GNA staff or IT staff, we tend to buy that e-learning.
KE: Training and Development has become a profit center?
DS: It has. It is a first for TeleTech.
KE: That is exciting. A couple of other questions for you, in terms of the balance between synchronous versus asynchronous, how much of the learning you are doing online is in the moment, real-time through web?
DS: I would say most of it is asynchronous in our blend. We have standard asynchronous courses to provide the standard messaging and then we use our live instructors in the classroom for fine-tuning and individual coaching. Now, I will say that when we are looking at global deployments, we do use a lot of virtual classroom training, similar to this webcast. So, when I deploy TeleTech University to all of my administrators around the globe, I am using a virtual classroom. Our sales force uses the virtual classroom every Friday to communicate sales information and to bond as that learning community grows. Our operations groups are looking at using virtual classroom and some of our clients are even asking us to provide product updates through virtual classroom. So, the virtual classroom training is about 20% of our mix, with the balance being asynchronous self-study.
KE: Are you developing your content through a learning content management system?
DS: Yes, we are. Actually, we have created our own player which integrates into our learning management system. Our learning management system is hosted by GeoLearning. They are an ASP provider of learning management system; and between the two, it has been working very well. We actually integrate a lot of different solutions within TeleTech University.
KE: That is good to hear because I know that sometimes data integration can be tricky.
DS: It is challenging. I would say you have to have some very good IT people involved and you have to have a really good LMS partner. I would call GeoLearning not just a vendor, they are really a partner with us and are very supportive. They have to be because there are a lot of challenges with integration, but we have been very successful.
KE: Let´s talk a little about the timeline. When did you begin the implementation and how did the timeline for roll out happen?
DS: I have been with TeleTech almost a year. I was hired on March 21st and my marching orders were to come in and implement and support the TeleTech University. So by May 2nd, we launched the beta. We started in Moundsville, West Virginia; Deland, Florida; Niagara Falls; Leon, Mexico; Mexico City; and then Roxas, Manila in the Philippines. That was the first group of people that I worked with. One thing that I want to point out about this group is that, even though we have countries around the globe participating, these are the call centers that support North American calls. So when you call in the middle of the night, you might get someone in the Philippines answering. Knowing that my total implementation was going to be global, it was very important to me to have the beta be global. This cross-cultural beta group was incredible and I have to say they really helped with the remaining launch. We learned a lot of lessons through this period of time, from May 2nd through to July 1st.
On July 1st, we launched the rest of the North American operation, 29 sites in all in the US, Canada, Mexico, Philippines, and also Argentina. By the end of the summer, we started thinking about the rest of the globe, and the plans were as follows: To implement in Australia in December which we did, the UK in January, New Zealand, India, Singapore and Malaysia in March. We were able to bring up Australia by the end of the year and begin the translation for our Spanish TeleTech University. At that point we felt we would be complete by Q1 and that would suffice for Mexico, Argentina, and Spain.
So, here we are in Q1 for 2006 and we in fact did launch the UK and we completed our Spanish translation of the TeleTech University site and we are at the process right now of translating all of the content -- 24 courses for agents, and about six courses for supervisors. We chose Castilian Spanish, the mother language. I know a lot of companies struggle over which dialect of Spanish but we decided on Castilian and that seems to have worked well even though we have several flavors in Latin America. It was kind of interesting - I had some orders to try to have Castilian Spanish work in Brazil, and those of you that know they speak Portuguese in Brazil, probably wonder about that and I did too. When we launched it in Spanish, the first feedback we got back from Brazil was that they needed this in Portuguese as well, so we did. We started a translation plan for Portuguese, so we will be looking at that probably coming out next quarter and we also this month continued to launch new sites in Canada and the Philippines. As a growing organization, we are continually opening up new sites. We are integrated with our Oracle HR system; and with that, we have to have Oracle implemented first because that´s where we get our user profile information. So as soon as Oracle is up and running in those countries (that is scheduled for next month) the very next day, we will register all of those students and that will enable us then to launch those countries as well.
KE: You have been enormously busy. I can´t believe how much you have accomplished in such a short time.
DS: It has been busy and a lot of fun. We are looking at launching in Spain and Brazil in language next quarter and then we will begin talks with Hong Kong to get traditional Chinese translated and we are also looking at upgrading our TeleTech University with Maestro 4.6 with GeoLearning. We are going to be taking their new upgrade that is coming out, I think in June, and we are actually looking at using that version to integrate not just the TeleTech University but also some of our other human capital solutions.
KE: You clearly have a highly motivated team in the learning and development arena that are working on all of these implementations. I want to talk a little bit of the change management aspect of rolling out this technology. How did you handle that piece? How did you make it attractive for the learners?
DS: Change management is probably the most important piece of a successful implementation. There are a lot different methodologies for change management; but rather than getting too locked into any one methodology, I just have to emphasize how important open and honest communication is. We would meet every Tuesday and Thursday with our groups around the globe in a virtual classroom, very much like this one, taking questions and answers. Today, we have cut that back a little bit because people are up and running and they are feeling good but we are really building those learning communities. So, every Thursday I take a virtual trip around the world and talk with the learning organizations in each of the countries.
Also, we have an internal marketing group that works with us. They create a lot of formal communications that go out. They also post a lot of testimonials and success stories on our intranet. For our students, we also provide 24/7 customer care lines and that is staffed by our GeoLearning maintenance agreement. We constantly have our system administrators here within TeleTech and the training community helping and supporting our students as well, so within the learning community, we reach out to GeoLearning and we also have a very expert team now that can consistently help all of our different students and administrators as they need it.
KE: Are you noticing any trends at all Donna in terms of populations that were more resistant to using the LMS or using e-learning than others?
DS: From just different places on the globe, no; but within each country, there is usually a site that is not as active as some of the others. I really have to say it has to do with the leadership. If you have a good leader at the site, you can bet that the training organization is going to be good and the students will use the system. That is something that we are monitoring right now - usage and scores.
KE: Without those local champions, it can be very difficult.
DS: Right. I did a survey in August last year, shortly after our primary launch on July 1st. It asked the training managers and the training coordinators in all of these 29 sites, what they felt about TeleTech University. We asked if the software functionality was an improvement, if the implementation was supported properly, and if the internal communications were effective. This is from the internal communications group that supported me throughout the implementation. We were asking about the need for ongoing communication, should that continue? Overall results were very positive. The 25% who neither agree nor disagree are my challenge. I always think that if they are on the fence, you can win them over and bring them into a high utilization of TeleTech University. We had some, as you do in any implementation, disagree and strongly disagree, but they were in a small minority, which I was very happy about. They tend to be in sites that did not have the strong leadership towards the implementation.
KE: I was recently talking to Josh Bersin, head of Bersin & Associates, he is a researcher and consultant, and he was talking about how he feels that in some ways the traditional corporate university model is really not current, that what is happening now is the need for a performance specialist in the field to bring learning needs to some sort of shared services organization who can then address them. What happens if there is a learning need identified in a particular site of Teletech - does that information come through the training manager back into your organization to address it?
DS: The training and quality manager could bring that need to us but we are probably going to hear it long before they realize it from our clients and customers first. So, they typically will set the stage as far as what content that they feel is important about their product or service that we need to communicate. Definitely, we get feedback from our students and we have a tool called Geo Analytics. For those of you that may know about an organization called Knowledge Advisors, they are a part of the total solutions, so they are partnered with GeoLearning and they provide their tool that is called GeoAnalytics. We get a lot of feedback from the student level on what they need. We get information from our customers, from the training and quality managers, from anyone all the way up through the chain in the operations; and of course, we are also watching our assessments and our scores as well so that really is another avenue just looking at the performance whether it is average handling time, or the quality metrics on how well they handle the call. Those are all being looked at to determine what additional training we need to create. We have 24 courses right now for our agents and our goal is to have 15 more courses every quarter.
KE: Wow! That is ambitious.
DS: So, we are taking requirements as we speak.
KE: I wonder about the performance support side of learning, an informal knowledge base that is accessible to an individual when they feel like they could use some support. How does Teletech provide this type of just-in-time performance support?
DS: We do have a library in TeleTech University that has a lot of different job aids available and we are looking at in the next version being able to integrate into that optimum rewards. We actually have a program we call ´Empower´ that is a part of that optimum rewards and it is a portal where our agents sign on in the morning and they can see their metrics. It is our vision as we go toward the integration of the GeoMaestro 4.6 to move toward the following scenario: An agent signs on, sees his/her metrics and for those metrics that are low, rather than having to look into the library or asking for training, our vision is that when the metrics drop, we will be able to push the right course to them, so there will be a link available as soon as they sign on that morning that says you really need to work this aspect of your job by taking this course and trying to improve that skill set. That is where we are going in the future.
KE: I was wondering about how learning results impact an individual´s performance review. It sounds like through this optimal rewards program, performance is measured and it links back to learning.
DS: Very much at TeleTech, yes, it is all tied. We are very performance oriented here.
KE: Terrific. What do you see as the top benefits of having a learning management system?
DS: I think that it has been an incredible benefit for us having the ability to blend e-learning into the total learning experience, the benefits of compressing the training time and still being able to have higher performers. That has been probably our biggest win. We are starting to see the metrics coming in now for some of our product training that we compressed from three weeks to two weeks. The metrics are not only as good as those that took the three weeks of training, they are actually coming in better, so that is one of our biggest benefits. The other thing that we just love about TeleTech University and having it an ASP hosted environment is that it is as easy as getting on the Internet. You can engage in learning activities at work but you can also do it at home and that has really helped a lot of people, not so much for our agents because they are hourly and we cannot expect them to take training at home. We have to pay them for their training, but for our G&A staff and our IT staff, it is nice to be able to take an extra course on your own, and take it in the evening. They see it as an extra benefit like attending college but having it paid for; this is another way of learning and improving yourself.
We have the online assessments and our surveys and this is saving us a lot of time. We have actually done some ROI studies on this and I know with one client and a particular one of our larger clients we´re seeing as much as half a million dollars in savings just from not having to take manual tests and surveys on an ongoing basis. We have a lot of requirements to do training every month and so it is not just the initial training on how they answer calls for that product or service but it is the ongoing changes every month having to take training and providing tests and scores to prove that the training was successful. That has been a big benefit for us. The students love being able to go in and check on their transcripts. They can run their own certificates of completion. Our students are very proud of their training and they love to hang those certificates in their cubicles and it is something that has been very important from a cultural standpoint here. I think that is a part of the TeleTech culture - to be proud of your training, and then the nice thing again is the whole support of the global deployments having virtual classroom, being able to use this around the world, having TeleTech University being translated and being able to be in the native language of our students that require that, that has been another big benefit by going this route.
KE: You mentioned easy access and it is interesting because I assume given that the call center folks are sitting at computers that they would have easy access to the e-learning and it turns out they do have easy access to the LMS but it is not through their own terminals. Why don´t you tell us a little about that?
DS: That is true Karen, this actually comes with a lot of our client contracts. If you think about what we want our agents to perform it is to answer the phone and not be surfing the net, so almost all of our agents have computers locked down so they do not have Internet access. We set up training rooms or training labs to accommodate training time. Our operations group has to schedule our agents to have time to do these courses which is also interesting because we have to schedule based upon call volume. Very often we just have a 15-minute blip of time where we can take people off of the phones and on to training, so that presented a challenge to us as far as course design goes. Most of our courses for agents are set up so that they can take a 15-minute blip of training and get back on the phones easily. Of course, all of our courses can be bookmarked so that is always a possibility too, but we would like to have a learning topic done within a 15-mintue period of time and that would include completing the content and then taking whatever the assessment would be and being able to then get back on the phones. The next time they go in, they learn something else, a new learning objective.
KE: What do you think was the secret sauce in terms of this implementation, I mean this is a great success story, you had limited time to do it, and you have done a phenomenal job, what was the secret to success?
DS: Without sounding too trite, I have to say it is the people. Getting back to the change management and the communication, I cannot emphasize how important that is, especially if you are doing a global implementation. If you are an implementation program manager that would prefer to just do it yourself and hopefully everybody will catch on and use your tool, it´s probably going to remain a pipe dream. You really have to develop those relationships. I have never met any of these people face to face, yet I consider all of them very much my friends because we talk on a constant basis, I hear from each of these individuals every week if not every day, either through email or through my Thursday calls or separate meetings. If some people feel a little intimated to ask questions when there are 20 people on the phone, I offer a one-on-one session. I do have help with that, I have a wonderful system administrator who has been with me every step of the way and she takes the calls as well one on one. So, we provide a lot of different avenues to communicate, but I have to honestly say that the secret sauce is the change management.
