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Ulysses Learning, New York, NY

How to EnterCompany: Ulysses Learning, New York, NY
Company Description: Ulysses Learning is an industry leader in improving service, sales and coaching performance in contact centers in industries as varied as insurance, energy and telecom. Founded in 1995, the company is known for building Judgment@Work ™ skills – decision making and advanced interaction skills – at all points of customer interaction throughout the organization.
Nomination Category: Solution Provider Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service or Call Center Training Practice of the Year

Nomination Title: Using Judgment@WorkTM to take customer service – and the overall customer experience – to the next level

Tell the story about what this nominated organization has achieved since the beginning of July 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

The stakes are high in every customer conversation. In mere seconds, an unskilled service or sales representative can squander what should have been years of profitable business for your company.

Judgment@WorkTM skills are often the missing link between executive intent and frontline execution to achieve your important service and customer loyalty objectives. Ulysses Learning prepares people in contact centers and across entire enterprise to apply Judgment@Work.

We believe meaningful performance measurement and support is a crucial ingredient to any performance improvement initiative. Management and support must be intelligently addressed and administered before, during and on an ongoing basis after training implementation.

Ulysses Learning works with contact center leaders in a number of industries, including energy/utilities, insurance, telecommunications and hospitality, to take the organization to the next level of performance in customer service and coaching. We employ a consistent customer and organization-focused service model using a conversation strategy that defuses emotion, demonstrates empathy, gets to the heart of the customer need quickly and resolves the problem on the first call whenever possible. The result is to improve first call resolution, reduce escalated calls and overall enhance the customer experience.

Ulysses Learning uses a blended learning process that combines facilitated, classroom training with simulation-based eLearning. We’ve found that a facilitated discussion or exercise is the best method for having people share and talk about the skills they’ve learned, while simulation-based eLearning lets employees learn and practice customer service skills in a safe environment, rather than just having them role-play the skills with partners or worse, having them practice on actual customers.

In order to sustain results, Ulysses Learning helps organization build a better coaching process. Our coaching approach builds a consistent coaching process throughout the contact center and improves the performance of coaches, so they can sustain the behavioral change of representatives long after the initial training has occurred.

The Ulysses Learning process:

• Engages leadership and the frontline in a cultural change focused on an exceptional customer experience.
• Improves a representative’s ability to defuse emotion and take control of the conversation with the customer
• Enhances the questioning (and listening) abilities of representatives to get to the heart of the customer issue and identify needs
• Provides the necessary behavioral skills so that representatives conduct more customer-focused conversations resulting in increased customer satisfaction
• Positively impacts service measures and ensure long term sustainability through more effective skills training and coaching
• Provides a sustainable coaching process that changes behavior at the point of the contact
• Provides next-level development to the frontline reps to ensure the best customer experience

Our clients have:

• Reduced escalated calls by 27%
• Increases customer satisfaction by 15%
• Decreased call backs by 25%
• Improved average handle time up to 10 seconds or more
• Improved average quality monitoring scores up to 30%

As Ulysses Learning’s simulation eLearning thought-leader and a Board of Director, Roger Shank validated our research with an industrial psychologist over a four-year period on 70,000 customer interactions. Our developmental partners include American Express, Fidelity, BMO, Intuit and others.

Headquartered in New York, Ulysses Learning has field offices in Charlotte, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and Toronto, along with group offices in London and Athens.

 

 

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader of this nominated company:

Dina Vance is Ulysses Learning’s Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing/Managing Director of North American Operations. She is a widely respected thought leader on developing and leading contact center staff and a pioneer in improving the performance of contact centers. Vance was responsible for the ground-level startup of two contact centers before she moved into a consulting role where she managed the call center division for an international consulting and training organization. She has worked with Fortune 100 companies to optimize their contact center performance through focus on results, people and process.