At a glittering awards ceremony on Wednesday night in Edinburgh, Sky in partnership with Brightwave picked up the highly coveted Customer Contact Association (CCA) Excellence Award for Most Effective Training Programme 2009. Facing tough competition with ten on the short-list, the award recognises the innovative ‘Get Up To Speed’ onboarding internet portal which accelerates time to target performance for all new Sky contact centre staff helping them build knowledge before their start date.
The Get Up To Speed onboarding portal helps Sky’s large volume of new contact centre staff deliver excellent customer service to its nearly 10 million customers by building product and company knowledge in a fun way before they start work. It particularly appeals to the company’s large number of Generation Y recruits by using social networking (including blogs to connect staff to new recruits) and interactive games. The online portal also uses a video belt and simulated customer scenarios, as well as incentive mechanisms to encourage repeated completion through a real-time leader-board.
To date Sky’s onboarding portal has accelerated time to target performance, reduced induction time by a quarter, halved staff attrition, fully engaged staff (100 per cent completion) and improved sales conversions. The programme is also short-listed for an E-Learning Award with winners being announced 12 November.
Charles Gould, MD at Brightwave said: “We are delighted with the performance and results from our new Get Up To Speed onboarding portal for Sky. It’s great to have this project recognised by the contact centre industry’s key trade body and it’s testament to the highly creative, diligent and business-focused work put in by the team at Brightwave and Sky.”
Kenny Henderson, head of talent development operations at Sky added: “Working on a project with such a broad range of stakeholders is always challenging, however, Get Up To Speed gained universal support across Sky. We’re delighted to have won the CCA Global Excellence award with Brightwave and find the potential business impact really exciting.”
The Get Up To Speed e-learning programme will be presented at Online Educa 2009 in Berlin on 3 December as part of a ‘Cloud Learning’ session. It will be led by Sky’s head of talent development operations, Kenny Henderson and Brightwave’s director of learning services, Lars Hyland. Online Educa is the largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public sectors, running 2-4 December 2009.
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Furthermore, Sky’s onboarding programme will also be presented at Learning Technologies on 28 January 2010, as part of a session by Kenny Henderson at Sky titled ‘Be Sure What Success Looks Like’. Brightwave will be exhibiting at Learning Technologies from 27 to 28 January 2010 at Olympia, London – it is Europe’s leading showcase of technology supported workplace learning.
