Empowering Call Center Reps to Reignite Customer Relationships

Time Warner Cable

Challenge

Time Warner faced a thorny customer retention problem. When the company’s promotional pricing offers expired, so did a good portion of its customer base: 25 percent of its subscribers every year.

Most of these cancellations happened by phone—subscribers would call customer service and ask to end the relationship. Call center agents could either process the cancellation or offer a substitute promotion and begin the vicious cycle again.

Time Warner approached Gillespie Associates to develop a training program that would give its call center team the knowledge, skill, and motivation to shift these key discussions to value rather than price, with a goal of increasing customer retention by five percent. 

Results

By applying our principles of adult learning to a custom training solution, we helped Time Warner Cable blow past its goal and increase customer retention by 40 percent.

How we did it

We gave Time Warner’s call center team something much more powerful than a revised call script. Our training helped each team member tap into critical thinking skills, intuition, and motivation—what we called “Retention Hero Superpowers”—and respond to customers’ concerns in the moment.

Inspiring employees by showing them the difference they can make
The classroom portion of the training kicked off with a trivia game that revealed the hidden costs and consequences associated with failure to retain a customer.

Making good use of learners’ personal experience
As classroom prework, learners submitted one of their most challenging retention situations. At the end of the training, these scenarios became the foundation of a role-playing game in which learners applied their new retention skills.

Learning in response to real life circumstances
Learners listened to and analyzed real call center recordings, building an understanding of how retention techniques worked in practice and reworking unsuccessful calls. An online retention simulator allowed learners to practice retention skills in a life-like scenario, without the pressure of dealing with actual customers. The simulator also allowed learners to explore customer retention through the lens of other job roles.

Helping learners inspire each other
We helped Time Warner create a online resource bank where employees could learn from and encourage each other by sharing successful customer interactions through videos, stories, and recorded calls.

Empowering employees to incorporate new skills their way
Learners created a personalized job aid based on the aspects of the training they felt were most valuable and developed an action plan to put their newly acquired retention skills into action. 

How We Can Help You

Are you ready to find out how Gillespie Associates can help your employees and team members reach and exceed your goals? 
Contact us today!