Teleperformance, leading provider of outsourced CRM and contact center services, serves companies around the world with customer acquisition, customer care, technical support, and debt collection programs. The company operates 98,000 computerized workstations, with more than 135,000 full-time employees across 250 contact centers in 49 countries. Teleperformance manages programs in more than 66 languages, operating in a wide variety of industries.

Teleperformance provides help desk support for Microsoft's Office 365 suite of online services. To meet the rapidly growing demand for Microsoft Office 365 and because Microsoft requires that support engineers must be certified Microsoft Specialists, Teleperformance needed to ramp up training of their Tier 1 and Tier 2 customer support engineers.

We performed initial pilot training at Teleperformance on behalf of Microsoft and won the contract for the launch of Microsoft certification training for support engineers. Our knowledge of the Microsoft curricula enabled us to quickly begin working with Teleperformance to identify the challenges and hurdles of certifying non-IT people and fitting them into IT support roles.

We worked with Microsoft Global Tech Readiness and Teleperformance to create modular, customized training for new employees and coordinated skills-gap assessments for existing employees. During the first four weeks, 45 students participated in the training program. The diverse group of employees with varying IT skills used on-demand training that allowed for flexible lab access, online assessments, and student self-checks to enhance course material comprehension and student confidence.

To reinforce concepts, our instructors provided one-on-one, self-assessment reviews and pre-exam power hours. The modular MCITP and MCTS Boot Camps were a mix of our proprietary content and Microsoft Learning products. As the employee mix changed, we provided more foundational training. To ensure each student's success, we coordinated with Microsoft Volume Licensing to provide cost-effective Microsoft certification exam vouchers.

Hundreds of employees have been through the Teleperformance Microsoft training program, with an average of more than 10 certifications per student, including Windows Server 2008, Active Directory, Windows 7, Sharepoint, and Exchange. The investment in Teleperformance employee training resulted in higher customer satisfaction feedback, reduced the time spent on each help desk incident, better control of wages, and retention of qualified personnel.

"When we first considered the option of working with a third-party training organization to help our employees attain Microsoft certifications, we had no idea we would be able to customize the solution to the extent that we have been able to with Global Knowledge," said David Minkus, Executive Vice President, Strategic Account Management. "They have been so much more than simply a training company—they have been a true partner who has taken the time and made the effort to learn our business and continually recommend improvements and refine their training curriculum to achieve the results we needed."