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.