By Luke Stanton
Welcomm Launches Accreditation Scheme
… Empowering our people to deliver
In early 2020, we sent our entire workforce home to work remotely. For most businesses, understandably this would’ve paused projects or caused disruption to plans… but thanks to our size, technical expertise and determined people, we were able to remain incredibly agile.
Which is why, in the face of a pandemic, we continued to launch the Welcomm Accreditation – a comprehensive and fully in-house training program, designed to give our Account Managers in-depth knowledge of our products and services, and develop their sales acumen.
Through this investment in our people, we aim to empower and equip our Account Managers with the knowledge and experience they need, to continue to recommend the very best solutions for business, and provide personable customer service that builds strong trusting partnerships with their customers.
What does the Accreditation include?
Each delivered over a 6 month period, we have developed three tiers of training, to ensure that every new starter we onboard gets the same strong foundation, tools and knowledge as our long serving staff. This way, we can ensure our customers all receive the same consistent quality of care.
BRONZE
Includes fundamental product overviews to introduce the full range of solutions we provide, the outcomes we can achieve for businesses and to ensure our service quality standards are understood and upheld on every call.
This tier is designed to help our people develop greater confidence and skills to ask important questions, earn their customers’ trust by solving common problems and add value to maximise return on investments.
SILVER
Includes in-depth product knowledge, to ensure our Account Managers can identify and articulate solution benefits across all product pillars effectively, and make expert recommendations tailored to customer needs.
With each team members’ progress and core KPIs measured by our Call Quality Management system to ensure consistency across the team, Silver Accreditation is a huge milestone in any Account Managers’ career.
GOLD
Building on previous training levels, the Gold tier is launching in H2 2021 to provide our teams with advanced product knowledge and solution scoping skills, to offer greater value and support to businesses.
This tier equips our people to act as consultants across all services and build strong partnerships with our customers that help them grow their businesses by transforming the way they communicate and operate.
What outcomes have you achieved?
The aim of the Welcomm Accreditation is to help our Account Managers be the best in the industry. We want each customer, no matter how many products they take from us, to have one point of contact that can effectively manage their full account, add value across all services and look after their business needs holistically.
As a result of this training, since the launch in 2020, we have seen…
- A significant increase in consistent call quality, across both sales and operational teams
- More opportunities opened across all product pillars
- Our highest customer satisfaction scores since the introduction of the scoring matrix
Customer satisfaction scores, in addition to other metrics monitored by O2, resulted in Welcomm winning O2’s prestigious ‘Partner of the Year’ award for the fourth year running.
Bozena Markiewicz
Holly Riley
Gareth Beecham
Hear from Account Development Manager, Holly Riley as she discusses how she’s benefited from Welcomm’s Accreditation:
“The accreditation has been a fantastic opportunity for me for me to develop, as it gives me a goal to focus on. Having completed bronze and now moving on to silver, I have already found myself asking different questions to better identify customer needs. The training has helped me recognise and better articulate the value Welcomm provide to businesses – which has increased my confidence when talking to my customers.
The CQM (Call Quality Management) process is my favourite part of the program, as I have time each week booked in to listen back to my calls. I get support and coaching to understand how I can make more of my conversations, and reflect on the improvements I know I can make to give the customer a better experience.
Following this training, I am so pleased to have been promoted within Welcomm to look after our larger accounts. Fundamentally, I feel invested in and like my efforts undertaking the accreditation have been rewarded.”
Why invest in your people?
We understand that our people are our best assets, and that creating a culture of engaged, happy team members is well worth the effort. That is why, in the last 12 months, we have also invested in a full-time team member (Michelle Westwood, Customer Experience Support) to score calls, coach staff and maintain/report on call quality standards.
Yet, training our team to best support our customers and represent our brand isn’t new. Over the past decade, Welcomm has invested heavily in rolling out Pareto, Management and Compliance training across the business. However as the saying goes… ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it’…
It is a priority for us to ensure our people get chance to practice and reinforce their training; to ensure our standards are held high and we empower our people with the tools they need to do the very best job they can.
Following 12 months of hard work, our team got together to congratulate Account Manager, Gareth Beecham for recently graduating with silver accreditation status.
At the heart of it, seeing our people improve over the past year has been incredibly positive and rewarding for me personally. The real value for our business is seeing the development and buy-in from our people – our Account Managers WANT to achieve and grow, and be the best for our customers.
