My Personal History of Customer Service, Just the First Part

When potential employers and job boards ask me how many years of customer service that I have, I'm afraid I'm going to look really old.  This year, for instance, the count would be twenty-six years.

When I was thirteen, my mother opened a flower/vegetable/bedding plant/nursery business out of our home in Northwest Ohio.  We had fifteen acres of property on the corner of Williams County Roads C and 20, and the name of the business was Nancy's Gardens, named after my mother.  The hours, being home-based, were a bit on the funky side (open Tuesday and Friday afternoons, all day Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and closed on Sunday and Monday), and I was just beginning my teenage years.  Other girls my age were getting on the phone at all hours and finding ways to experiment with clothes, makeup, and dating.  I was doing my homework after dark, weeding, cleaning the cattails out of the water lily beds, and raising baby chicks.  We took our family vacations in the fall, because summer was the busiest time for the farm, and family vacations never extended farther than where we could drive to in a day.

I honestly didn't mind it much, save one factor--we lived in a small and friendly community, and my mother had a hard time with boundaries.  People who knew her hours came by anyway on Sunday and Monday because they insisted that "Nancy wouldn't mind," so there were never "normal" mealtimes or activities.  But, with a farm you don't really have that much anyway--that's part of the beauty of agriculture.  You have to give up free time to gain knowledge of how the world works.

You'd think that I would have been resentful, but I wasn't.  (Okay, it took leaving for me to admit that, but still...)  Agriculture taught me a lot about acceptance.  It taught me even more about customer service.  I learned to stay flexible, and ready.  When my mother was sick with cancer in 2001, I had to be nice for her.  I also had to be firm for her.  We had closed the business, we had put up signs, but so many people knew that "Nancy surely didn't mean them" when she meant closed.  I had to be understanding with these people, and firm.  It was a challenge, but the experience was also trying to teach me a lesson about work/life balance.

Agriculture teaches you a lot about process.  It teaches you to think on your feet.  I loved that feeling to the point that a few years after moving to Missouri (about the time I went to school for my Bachelor's degree) I worked on a ranch part-time, for FUN.  (This was in addition to going to school full-time and working full-time as a corporate trainer.)  Neither one of my forays into agriculture have been for money; one I inherited, the other one was because I was missing the first experience.  In Missouri, the time was spent on a beef cattle ranch, the dreaded task once a year in November was to vaccinate the cattle.  I say "dreaded" because everyone else dreaded it--the guy who owned the farm LOVED it, and I LOVED it.  We loved herding the cattle in, getting covered in mud, getting kicked, running from the bull--all of it.  I think the owner had a John Wayne envy working there, but mine was feeling useful, serving the cattle, serving others, taking me back to knowledge I inherited and could use again.  Everyone else who hated it hated what I loved about it, so I would try to do all the tasks so that everyone else would have a better experience.  At the end of the day I was worn out, but I felt like I had contributed.

My first customer experience was with a farm, serving a community.  When I came back to a ranch, that experience was with internal customer service, serving those who stood with me.

I think about both farms a lot these days as I make my way around the Bay Area on mass transit or in rental cars.  There's a constant need to be kind and considerate to each other on mass transit, or in California traffic.  What I find really amazing is how rare it is, and I often have to take the bull by the horns (pardon the pun), and be the one who is kind and considerate, even though it pays me nothing at all. That's how it all began--someone interrupting my dinner for water lilies, and now to someone asking for directions on BART.  I feed off of my foundation.

 More on my passion, my foundation, next week.  Have a great workweek.

Mentorship On Both Sides of the Gender Coin

When I was in college, my women's history professor gave us an assignment to interview and write a paper on our female mentor--a professional woman that we looked up to. My college advisor was a man, my best friend--while older than me and working outside the home--didn't consider herself a professional, so my mother was the default. Actually, my mother was my first choice, but I had to present the argument that she had no choice but to be interviewed by me for this paper. My mother owned a business--what they call in Ohio a "truck farm" for its rural and agricultural wares--and she operated it out of her home. When people ask me how long I've been in customer service, I have to count back to when I was thirteen, for I was helping her customers at that age.

A "truck farm" is one that sells bedding plants, fruits, vegetables, and sometimes livestock or livestock products (such as eggs) to customers right on site, instead of providing it to retailer. A business of this nature often requires devotion of long hours, of being available to customers outside of posted business hours, and easily detracts from challenges in weather, road conditions, etc. My mother's decision to start this business was not only seen by others as a challenge, but at times she was considered to be slightly crazy, since she started it when she was forty years old.

I knew very little about the nuances behind her decision when she started the business, but by interviewing her and writing that paper, I learned so much that I don't think she would have shared with me otherwise. Since that paper I've graduated college, she became ill with cancer and passed away in 2002, but I've taken a lot of factors of her decision into play when I decided to leave Grainger and set out to find another position. Recently, on a trip to southern California to visit my brother, I caught an article in The New Yorker that reminded me of what my mother shared, an article about Sheryl Sandberg's transition from Google to Facebook, and how women are viewed as leaders in the Silicon Valley. In the article reporter Ken Auletta talks about privilege, challenges, and power in Sandberg's inspiration to move up within the ranks in Silicon Valley. I was struck and delighted by Sandberg's approach to new opportunities in her career and the careers of women in the Bay Area--how most women had a "hangup" about the word "power," and the drive that makes men "bang down the door for new assignments...the next thing that stretches them," while women have to be "talked into it." She talked about the challenges of having a male mentor and what that mentorship looks like to colleagues in her field. Her "aha" moments in her career path reminded me of my mother's challenges and in mine in working on projects that I passionate about. It was re-affirmation of what I feel I can offer to customers and to employees.

And it was a gentle reminder of the strong mentor I hope to be one day, to men or women.

Resume Parts & Pieces, Education

I won't pull a David Copperfield here and go all the way back to my kindergarten years; suffice it to say I went to a small town school growing up and my high school graduating class counted somewhere between forty and fifty graduates. I fell somewhere toward the top, but I was not the valedictorian or the salutatorian. I was strong in academics but not strong in athletics, with interests in music, journalism, and drama.

I waited to go to college until I had been out in the world for a little while, starting college at the age of 21. I was working as an assistant manager at the time in a luggage shop in a Branson, Missouri outlet mall when my manager noticed all of the books that I read and thought that I might like to take a class with the instructor who was teaching her introduction to literature class with a local community college, and I signed up just as an audit and fell in love with the academic culture and the knowledge I could acquire, regardless of class. I made the decision to start with my Associate of Arts degree in General Education to get my required courses out of the way, but what I wanted to study most was literature, which was primarily the courses I took while attending Ozarks Technical Community College. The instructors were patient, fair, and challenging despite the community college level, and while I was there I discovered another academic passion in history. Because I was committing myself to a full course-load I resigned from the assistant manager position in Branson and moved an hour north to Springfield, Missouri to be closer to the college and to find a job to work part-time, which I found in working for companies like MCI and Bass Pro. In these kinds of jobs and combined with my education commitments I developed a strong sense of commitment to efficiency and learning, both in the corporate world and in the academic world.

In between obtaining my Associate's and going to university study for my Bachelor's, I spent nearly a year back in Ohio helping my parents with their agricultural business, and then moved back to Missouri to pursue my Bachelor of Arts at what was then Southwest Missouri State University. I had performed well enough at Ozarks Technical to obtain scholarships at Southwest Missouri State, and thrived in classes at the university level. It was also at this time that I returned to Bass Pro Shops call center and made quick work of getting promoted to the corporate training instructor on the evening shift. Throughout the remainder of my college career I worked full time at Bass Pro and went to school full time double-majoring in literature and history until the final semester of my education at SMSU, at which point I decided to place full focus on my literary studies.

This blog owes a lot to my education at SMSU (which is now known as Missouri State University). I took my passion of the literary arts education and applied it to communicating effectively and inspirationally in all of my employment experiences, from Grainger to Bass Pro Shops, and to communicate in a way that would be effective to the greatest amount of people I was addressing, rather than just the highest-ranked of those I was addressing. Literature and history have taught me that the most effective communicator isn't the one with the biggest vocabulary--it's the one who uses the words he or she has to their greatest advantage. My goals in any position are to communicate the company's goals in an inspirational way to employees and customers alike, without losing them in the process.

In my next post I will talk about how I use my communication skills, and other technical skills, to do just that in a workplace situation.

Resume Parts & Pieces, Work Experience: Bass Pro Shops

By the time I left Bass Pro Shops in 2002, I had worked there for a total of seven years, if you count the first time that I worked there. I started out there as a customer service associate answering phones in the new call center that opened on the north side of Springfield, Missouri in the mid-90's, left at the end of 1996 to spend just over six months with my family in Ohio, and returned in the third quarter of 1997 to go back to the phones. At one point an opening for a training instructor on the evening shift came up, and I was moved to that position.

I had never taught a group of people before that position, but I was a voracious student, and after I started teaching I discovered that I loved it in a way that I was born to love it. Loving my position was an excellent opportunity in more ways than one--not only did I have lots of people to train, I had lots of people to train alone. The day shift of training instructors had two instructors and an average of 25 people in classes on any given day; I was the only instructor on the night shift and had an average of 75. I learned to improve my time management skills in a hurry, not to mention my patience and my ability to develop talent within the groups that I taught to help teach each other.

Bass Pro had three levels of training during that time in the 90's:

• Order Training: A 3-week course with an introduction to call centers (many new hires were new to the industry) and tutorial, lecture, and practical application of taking calls around sending customers free catalogs and placing orders for them
• Non-Order Training: A 1-week course that the employee completed after having 60 to 90 days of experience in order training with their teams on the phones. Applications involved taking problem calls and finding lost orders for customers
• Specialty Training: A 1-week course that the employee completed after having 60 to 90 additional days of order training and 60 to 90 initial days of non-order training. Applications included taking Australia and New Zealand orders, and processing sports licensing for select states across the country

When I first began teaching, I taught from a list of topics that the training department had found appropriate for that level of teaching and conveyed the topics in the order suggested because it "had always been done that way." After a few sessions of training and playing with the order a little bit, I was able to come up with a curriculum that would not only cover the topics needed but enabled the student to learn the most effectively for what was being covered. Over time, I was able to convince my manager and the day training staff to utilize this curriculum so that training would remain consistent across the board and so that if schedules required, students could take a class during the day for one day and be taught the same information that they would have been taught in the night class. Over the course of my tenure at Bass Pro I developed similar standard curriculums for the non-order and specialty sessions, as well as assisting the quality assurance department with reviewing calls of agents for supervisors.

Bass Pro was my favorite work experience of any that I've had in my career. I was empowered to make changes to improve the experience of those in my care, as well as encouraged to utilize my creativity to improve the performance of everyone, regardless of whether they had been trained by me or not. I worked independently since the rest of the training staff, management staff, and quality assurance staff worked during the day, and I thoroughly enjoyed the concept of teaching because of the wide variety of things that it taught me as a person. I had to leave Bass Pro due to financial reasons (my mother had been recently ill and I needed to find a job with greater compensation, which I was not able to gain, even upon inquiry at Bass Pro), but I believe the company and the position contributed the most to my growth above any of the employers that I had the privilege of working for.

In my next post I will explore my higher education (beyond high school) and how it contributed to my experience as a manager and communicator.

Resume Parts & Pieces, Work Experience: Alltel Communications

Alltel was my experience in retail and my last work experience in the Midwest. The company was spread out in several call centers at that time in the Midwest and Southeast, with limited coverage in the west, and I worked as a customer service representative for customers who had questions about their contract and pre-paid billing statements. I also assessed cell phone bills from customers and made recommendations on products and services that Alltel offered that might help the customer make better use of their cell phone or getting better value for their usage.

When I started at Alltel I had just resigned from a training instructor position at Bass Pro Shops, and my primary reason for resignation was compensation. I had the opportunity to receive greater compensation at Alltel as a front-line associate on the phones than I had received in a position of leadership at Bass Pro, and I had full potential to move up within Alltel to a similar position of training or leadership that I had exercised at Bass Pro. Indeed, the first few months that I was with Alltel I adapted their company vision and processes so well that I was asked to help train and mentor new associates, even though I was a relatively new associate myself. It was gratifying to me as a trainer of the industry and empowering to me as a new associate to know that my efforts mattered.

It was at Alltel that I honed my skills in a call center setting and truly understood the fundamentals of call center performance in relation to customer satisfaction. Alltel's scheduling process was such that we shared call volume with one or two other centers across the south, but only if something overloaded systemically or if call volume inexplicably went up. We knew when to expect more calls and when to expect less, we learned how to budget our day so that customer plan changes and documentation could be completed within the day without down time and without overtime. And we learned that learning these lessons of efficiency would reward us. For instance, tenured employees with Alltel often received the highest pay and the longest amount of vacation time, but the best performers received vacation WHEN they wanted it and had the opportunity to bid quarterly on vacation requests and schedule preferences. Incentives for better plan correlation and feature usage on a customer's plan would grant employees prizes that they selected from a catalog of products ranging from writing instruments to fine leather products to furniture (I received a Coach wristlet as one of my prizes, and a hammock chair as another). Better performance also gave me more opportunities to coach others and to guide others to better performance in coaching sessions, classes, and filling in as a back-up team lead on occasion for the call center associates.

My reason for leaving Alltel was an opportunity to move to California and live closer to my family. If I hadn't had this opportunity, I would probably still be with Alltel to this day, and, by my best estimate, in a position of leadership. In my next segment I will talk about my favorite job experience that I ever had, with Bass Pro Shops as a swing shift training instructor for their call center.

Resume Parts & Pieces, Work Experience: Jarden Consumer Solutions

Jarden Consumer Solutions, or, as I commonly knew them when I worked there, Tilia and VillaWare, was my first employer in California. Technically the temp agency that hired me to work at Tilia was my first employer in California, but Tilia was my first job with them.

I was first hired with Tilia to work with the retail services representatives to answer their phones for them. There were between seven and nine representatives at that time, and the bulk of the phone calls were from retailers wanting to order Tilia (FoodSaver) or VillaWare products, or they wanted to speak with their representative in sales or operations. In other words, when I started in September of 2004 I was a receptionist, and by January of the following year I had been offered a job with the company to be a retail services representative myself, specializing in RMAs and certain retailers, such as Kohl's. About one month after I was hired at Tilia the entire company was given word that the operation was moving to Neosho, Missouri for shipping and warehousing, and to Hattiesburg, Mississippi for administrative. We would be assisting in the transition not only in our approach to customer contact, but in the systems that we used to process orders and ship supplies, going from an SAP system to an AS400 system. Most, if not all of us, would be staying through the transition that would be scheduled for completion in August of 2005.

The skills that I honed with Jarden were minimal compared with my past jobs prior to that point, but I did significantly branch out in one specific area: satisfying customers at a corporate level as opposed to a retail situation. Many of the customer service aspects of retail carry over to a business-to-business type of situation, but some do not--my biggest challenge was in taking care of customers who had multiple representatives for their corporations. Mastering this challenge was a simple process of determining the customer's needs AND the representative's needs so that I could equal the two out, not unlike my developed focus of strengthening a business through customer service while improving employee retention. The contacts that I made within our customer base often became friends in the sense that I could offer them solutions to make their ordering process progress more smoothly or that they would have to maintain it less often by trusting me with the replenishment details. And, while I've mentioned that it was a challenging skill to master, it was a pure joy to discover that next level of customer service in myself and my performance.

In the next post, I'll talk about how my last job in Missouri with Alltel Communications helped prepare me for the jobs I was to enter in California.