First Monthly Blog

The Amazing Team

Our project team works for an exciting, innovative timeshare club: Accor Vacation Club (AVC). The purpose of our project is to identify the AVC specific issues for retention in the AVC Call Centre. 

Our group consists of members with a diversity of knowledge backgrounds, abilities and interests. Each of us is full of energy, and every meeting is conducted in a humorous and relaxed way. Moreover, our instructor Jo'Anne is very inspiring, whose clear logic and rich experience make us feel reliable. 

Team members

✅Challenges around us！！

• Real Client! Real Project! 

A period of time before meeting clients can be described as confused and unconfident. This was the first time we faced real project and real client. On many things, we all seem to be in a hurry. Firstly, we do not have enough information about the Accor Vacation Club and our project, but only a general description of the organization, since we do not know much about the internal structure of the company. All we know is that our project is to create surveys and interviews for employee retention, but we have no idea about the specific client needs. Therefore, we are unable to determine what needs to be included in our report.

On the other hand, there is a challenge in designing questions for clients. Before meeting the client, we held several meetings specifically on how to design the content of questions. We need to make sure that the questions are logical and can be enable us to get useful information.

Meeting for question list design

Good outcome

Our confusion about the project has been well resolved. Kelly and Donna introduced us to the background of AVC and expressed their willingness to provide us with the relevant data that we need. During the meeting, Kelly and Donna answered each question and expanded the relevant content to help us deeper understanding. Meanwhile, Jo helped us better interpret questions better when our questions were not clear. Our question design benefited a lot from Jo's advice through her knowledge and experience. After the meeting, Kelly took us to visit different departments of AVC, where we were warmly welcomed by the employees!

Well done! First client meeting

• Method Changed Three Times?!

There were two challenges before the presentation. The first problem was the time conflict. In order to complete the two-page summary and presentation, we conducted three group meetings almost every week. But because everyone's free time is different, we become complicated in time arrangement. 

The second challenge was the repeated modification of proposal. According to Jo's suggestion, we made the second and third modification to ensure the rationality of the summary. Particularly, the determination of methodology is the biggest challenge in the design of our research strategy. We have modified it for three times. For the first time, all we know was that we can use SPSS to analyze the data but we did not have a clue about the other methods. We tried to design the process according to the 40 interviews proposed by the client, but interviewing 40 people is too time-consuming. After group discussion we decided  to do the questionnaire first and then make 10 interviews. 

After the presentation, the teaching panel suggested reconsidering the need to do face-to-face interviews, because this would be a "big task" for us. We may need to have a Plan B if our original plan fails to go accordingly. Regarding these suggestions, it is necessary for use to re-communicate with the mentor and the client, and then decide on the follow-up content of our project. 

Finally, we decided the following methods: initially, literature review will be conducted to understand more broadly why there are high attrition rates in call centres. Then, twelve interviews will be made to tell us why specifically the factors occurring in this context. After that, the questionnaire will be used to understand how big those issues are and clarify how the impact affects our study. Finally, our research will combine with the related literature and suggest the potential recommendations for the AVC.

  

the modification of proposal and PPT

Proposal presentation

✅What we learn

This is a good practice for us to learn how to prepare well before client meetings. Because in reality, every client meeting has a big impact on the follow-up process of the project. This not only requires us to have enough resistance to stay calm, but also requires us to be adequately prepared to show our politeness and positive attitude when in the face of our clients.

This month made us be clearly aware of the importance of teamwork. We worked together to solve the difficulties. We learned that this project is not a one-person thing but point effort that allows us to solve challenges effectively.  Fortunately, there has been no conflict in our group because we are inclusive of each other. In spite of the constant changes in methodology and the frequent modifications in the content of summary made us exhausted. 

One of the key points of teamwork is that: we have different personalities and different  ways of thinking. When we gather together, we use each other’s strengths to fix the problems. In the first month, we made some progress and started to trust each other that we can make it. Also, in the first month of collaboration, the project encouraged all of us to feel proud of our contributions by the sense of fulfillment through tackling obstacles and  working together. I believe we will better enjoy the teamwork. It does not mean that we will get 100%'s enjoyment, but when we do reflection after finishing one part, we will be surprised about our potential, we may  find new skills that we acquire and thus address all problems on the way.