"My first project management role was as part of the continuous improvement team at a call center. I was tasked to optimize processes between the sales center and customer care teams. Each team was using their own system separate from each other. Customers would call the sales number, even though they already had an existing order. The sales representative would then have to transfer the call by dialing out to the care team. This resulted in longer handling time for sales, which negatively impacted their stats and commissions, and customers frustrated from having to state their problem twice.

I had a two-part solution. The first part was to optimize the interactive voice response to pre-qualify callers and ensure they get routed to customer care if they had an existing order, and are not looking to add to or modify that order. The second part was to build a sub-team within customer care that processed these calls. As a result, the sales team's average handling time went down substantially, and we had 30% fewer complaints from customers about the transfer time."