by Jan Day
The Blackboard Team at Sutherland
As you may be aware, we recently made the decision to partner with Sutherland, a best-in-class support company based in Rochester, NY.
We recently finished several weeks of training the Sutherland staff on all of our products, support tools and processes. We did this by sending a rotation of some of our best people from the DC Support team to be onsite in Rochester. Our Rochester team went through detailed training and then we looked over their shoulders as they began performing case work.
The feedback from the DC training team has been wonderful. They have been impressed by the enthusiasm of the Rochester staff and how quickly they’ve absorbed the material, and their best practices for implementation give us a ton of confidence they are ready to handle the support work ahead of them.
The first week of April’s training was a “nesting” period where the Rochester team members were starting to use their training to handle existing cases, working with Blackboard Client Support tools and processes, and practicing the hand off of issues to our Level II teams in DC. This allowed them to do actual case work without taking front-line calls.
The phone routing to Sutherland was turned on April 7, a milestone that brought with it the first wave of client assignments. Additional client assignments will take place each week as we ramp up the support volume going to the Level I teams based at Sutherland. On April 21, all of the initial Level I client assignments will be complete and we will expand coverage hours to 8 AM – 11 PM. Throughout this training and ramp-up process, we will have DC Support staff on hand to mentor them every step of the way; this will continue through the end of April (and beyond as needed).
The team in Rochester is ready and feels like part of the DC-based Blackboard team. We are even decorating the cubicles in Rochester as we do in DC – with mouse pads, a Blackboard banner and university pennants from our clients to make them feel at “home.” Please join us in welcoming our team from Sutherland, the newest members of the Blackboard family.