American Express Bridges the Communications Gap
By Paul Harris

Challenge: American Express Corporation’s proprietary call centers around the globe were encountering challenges with their current training program, including how to develop a realistic new hire curriculum that mirrored their representatives’ job on the “floor.”  In addition, the company needed to enhance the way its representatives interacted and communicated with its customers. Traditional training methods met with limited success.

Solution: A simulated call center environment was created as part of a blended e-learning approach that enabled learners to practice typical tasks and gain dialogue practice without the risks involved in helping a live customer. The simulation curriculum is combined with an advanced technology that helps learners modulate their pitch, rate of speech, tone, and articulation. It produced a high level of customer satisfaction, greatly reduced training costs—and a BEST Award from ASTD for enterprise-wide success in employee learning.

To the corporate training department at the American Express, training and empowering the company’s distributed servicing network represents perhaps the ultimate challenge—that of training a workforce to communicate with and sell products to customers of any age, and from any region and socioeconomic background.

At American Express, call centers around the world support a variety of products, including credit cards, travel, and financial services, as well as credit and collections activities. Like other companies, American Express has traditionally relied on classroom learning to teach new hires its customer service business and to instill the cultural awareness to cope with regional idioms. The route to proficiency normally required 12 weeks.

But executives of the training department decided several years ago that they needed to further enhance the representatives’ ability to communicate and connect with customers. Internal and external quality measures indicated that change was needed. In addition, generational and regional communications gaps occur, even with seasoned employees.

“We decided to reengineer our entire new hire program to institute simulation-based training,” says Beth Harmon, acting vice president of operations training. Some representatives continued to struggle to master both content and communication ability, so the department opted to replicate a live environment for new hire training and upskilling, she says. “Now we replicate all standard call center metrics, including average handling time, quality, customer treatment, and availability,” she says. Doing so has meant a shift from an academic to a vocational model, a different philosophy.

How it works

Working with a vendor, American Express jointly developed a holistic solution that integrates a variety of computer-based technologies, including simulations, speech recognition, and role play, with close instructor and coaching support. It combines self-based learning, team meetings, presentation and interaction, the role-play engine for dialog practice, and simulated servicing scenarios. “By the end of any given learning sequence, the learner has practiced how to ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ at the same time,” says Harmon.

The first instructional engine to be employed was a simulated call environment called SIMON (Simulated Online Network). SIMON replicates various customer servicing scenarios and provides both a dialog practice and assessment functionality that allows the learner to service a virtual customer, perform account management tasks, and receive feedback—all risk-free. Learners listen to a request from simulated “customers” who might have strong regional accents, muffled delivery, or regional slang. Immediate feedback is offered from both the application and the instructor. SIMON learners simulate every major task on the floor, from the simplest to the most complex.

Another technology called LARA (Language Accent Recognition Application) was used to modulate the pitch, tempo, tone, clarity, and enunciation of the representatives so they could be understood by customers. The LARA application uses VOX technology, which was developed in the 1980s for the U.S. military. The technology is closely related to speech recognition software being developed today.

Measuring success

Following a pilot program, the training produced a significant lift in performance metrics. “Two weeks after the two-day training was completed, metrics measuring a customer’s rating of Easy to Understand, Listening, and Courtesy increased 55 percent, 13 percent, and 8 percent, respectively,” says American Express. A pre- and postassessment of the learner’s vocal characteristics showed a 46 percent improvement in articulation, 50 percent improvement in volume, and 21 percent increase in rate of speech.

The organization leveraged the training initiative and broadened the impact of learning in both globalization and job function. Since the pilot course’s launch in 2002, the training initiative has been implemented across continents and cultures in many locations around the world. More than 2,000 learners have completed new hire training using simulators and blended learning in a simulated production work area/learning lab.

In short, the company has gone from 70 days of classroom training in 2002 to a blended learning program that has its new hire employees taking live calls by week three, says Harmon. That translated to $1.3 million in cost avoidance before the wider rollout. 

On the horizon

The training program has since been expanded to other job categories, says Harmon. Next year, it will be used to train domestic and international new hires involved in customer service, back office and front office activities, new accounts, billing and payment services. In addition, the stand-alone instruction engines will be linked to new hire engines for increased effectiveness.

Harmon says that the training department is able to employ the technologies economically because the learning system is template driven. “When changes are needed, we don’t have to go back to the vendor to make them unless we must change a core piece of technology,” she says. But she cautions that the technology in itself is not responsible for the company’s impressive training successes. “You still need the interaction and the coaching, but the instructor’s role has shifted. The instructor must be more engaged, and must know how to drive behaviors to meet performance metrics.”

For training directors considering whether to employ sophisticated e-learning technologies, Harmon has some advice. “Make sure you understand the customer issues,” she says. At American Express, the assignment was to solve a business problem in the most effective way. Would that necessarily mean technology, and if so, what? “When we looked at the issues, technology was a means to get there. But it was not the whole piece. Instructors had to be engaged and active with their feedback.”