Kaplan Test Prep Doesn't Simply Engage Contact Center Agents; It Empowers Them [Q&A]

For Kaplan Test Prep, "empowering people to achieve their goals" represents a fundamental part of the culture. It is the promise the Fortune 500 education services company makes to its customers, and it must also be the guarantee leaders make to employees.

How does the organization fulfill that promise? How does Kaplan empower its contact center agents to empower customers?

Erin Fox (pictured), who is the executive director at Kaplan Test Prep, will reveal the answers during a site tour presentation at the upcoming Call Center Week Winter event.

She previews that presentation – and shares valuable insights – in this exclusive interview with Call Center IQ.

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Call Center IQ: Terms like "employee engagement" are thrown around quite loosely in corporate circles. From your organization’s standpoint, what does "employee engagement" truly entail?

Erin Fox: I see employee engagement in two buckets. One is about contact center celebration weeks, birthday parties, balloons, and that sort of thing. It is about having fun and keeping people engaged throughout the day.

The other element is individual development, and that is what keeps people engaged for the long-term. You have to balance the fun distractions with opportunities for people to grow professionally in their current job before eventually transitioning into new positions.

Why are engagement initiatives so important, particularly within the contact center?

It’s a very difficult job to be a contact center agent. In many contact centers – ours included --agents have the same types of conversations with the same types of customers. All day. Every day.

As a business owner or business leader, you want each of those conversations to be fresh, engaged, positive, and helpful. You want to create a great overall experience.

Engagement helps manage that tug between doing the same thing every day and needing to make each interaction great.

Kaplan’s promise is not simply to engage agents but to empower them. What does that entail?

Empowerment is just how we operate. Our mission is to help individuals achieve their educational and career goals, and that trickles through the entire organization. This is inherent in the way we run our whole business.

For us, empowerment comes down to treating our contact center agents as individuals. We empower them to make decisions about how they handle cases for our students.

We want the best outcomes for our students, and including the agents in the decision-making process allows them to "own" their performance. They have more investment in the service they provide and a stronger desire to make sure they’re able to help.

The contact center has historically relied on rigid scripts and procedures. Empowering the agents to make independent decisions may seem intimidating. How do you overcome that fear?

It is incredibly important for agents to operate with timely and accurate context about the goals of the business. What challenges are our customers facing? What is going on in the market?

We do quite a bit of work to make sure our agents stay connected to the other business units. They understand the strategy, what product development is happening, and the key marketing messages. They are ready to represent the business.

At the end of the day, our business world is one driven by results. How do you measure the success of employee engagement and empowerment initiatives?

There are four key ways that we measure success:

1) The findings from our annual, company-wide engagement survey.

2) Career trajectories. How many agents have progressed to different roles – inside or outside of the contact center – at Kaplan?

3) Performance against key talent engagement metrics, including measures related to attrition and retention.

4) Performance against key customer experience metrics, including Net Promoter Score and CSAT Score.