More compliments, from the inside

At the Empire I’m a member of a cross-unit team that handles three or four high-visibility accounts who pay for lots and lots of special handling.  We have to troubleshoot directly with the customer or verify troubleshooting already done, make sure that dispatches get sent out properly to meet the service level agreements, and afterward verify that service was performed and the problems were fixed.  A couple of the contracts are also being changed as we go along, so the rules that go for one week may not be the same the next.  It takes a lot of hand-holding and a lot of paying attention.

It also means that I spend a LOT of time out of the queue and not taking ordinary incoming calls, as we try to manage these fractious and difficult customers.  For one reason and the next, I’ve ended up being one of the two backups to the team leader, and a few weeks ago I wound up being the acting team leader when the real leader had to be gone for a week and a half with a family emergency.  I was workload manager, watching to see that calls got covered and followed up, I got to know several technical account managers much better than before, I put out a lot of fires and helped to squelch a fire or two in the making, and tried my best to learn the team lead’s job as I was doing it.  It was exhausting but exciting, and everyone was really nice and helpful as I tried to cover.

After the team leader got back, he wrote the Tulip the following letter:

I would like to thank you for your support and for providing Sam to assist in the support of the SLA contracts to include, State A, Corporation B, Corporation E and State C.

Without his support we would have experienced extreme high payouts in penalties for missed service levels to these customers.  Sam has been instrumental in assuring that our associate technicians are trained and responsive to the customers’ needs and requirements.

During my recent absence Sam maintained the extreme high level of support, and with the constant change in the contract requirements played a major role in the increased service level for the State C contract.

Sam’s role in support of the SLA contracts are noted throughout the Empire and our supporting vendors and he is continually recognized as the reason we continue to be successful in meeting/exceeding the customer’s requirements and expectations.

Without Sam’s level of detailed attention and desire to provide the customer with a most professional experience, the accounts would surely have been negatively impacted.

Respectfully,

Team Lead for SLAs

All the coaxing along has worked.  On one contract that was having dreadful problems at the start, we just pulled up the successful completion rate of SLA calls from 47% to 100% in two weeks’ time.  Yes, I give the queue manager heartburn because I stay in auxiliary-work codes a big chunk of my time instead of taking calls, but it’s paying off, and those statistics and that letter show it.

Nail polish is unmistakably the itchy octavo.  Fnord.