Student saves call centre £65,000 in training costs

A student has seen her university project on call centre induction put in place at Virgin Media call centres UK-wide.

Katie Carroll, 28, of Stockton, researched and implemented a project on the best ways to induct call centre employees as part of her work-based BA (Hons) degree in Leadership and Management at Teesside University.

The project focused on streamlining the induction process and helping employees to learn faster.

“As I’d worked as a team manager, I knew that there’s a huge difference between someone who has had a good induction and someone who hasn’t. This gave me a great understanding of how important the induction process is,” said Katie, who has one year left of the work-based learning degree. “I recognised there were ways of improving the training process and my degree gave me the opportunity to explore that.”

The project has been recognised as a leading example of first class training design and has allowed induction programmes to be streamlined.

“I selected Katie for the job of rewriting one of our key induction programmes as I was confident that the blend of ‘fresh eyes’, aptitude, her ability to gather resources and experience of managing a team would be very successful when combined with the more formal learning Katie was going through in her work-based degree,” said Kelly Black of Virgin Media. “I’m delighted that this proved to be the case.”