"My first project management role was as part of the business solutions team at a call center. I was tasked to optimize processes between the sales center and customer care teams. Each team was using its own system respectively. 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 numbers. Customers were frustrated from having to state their problem twice.
I had a two-part solution. The first part was to optimize the interactive voice response AI 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 an escalation team within customer care that specialized in these calls. In case a caller is routed incorrectly by the IVR, sales would know to transfer the call warmly to the escalation team. 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."
