Bryan Needs a Title for His Home Page
Workplace improvements as a job survival strategy.
Sometimes the biggest improvement isn’t optimizing the process. It’s eliminating the thing everyone assumed was permanent.
In late 1996, a temp agency placed me at CampusMCI, a college-focused ISP division of MCI Communications, as a call center support operator. I’d spent two years translating print to web for a gaming magazine I co-founded.
On my first day, I learned that each shift started with a photocopied hot list of known problems. I sat down at a VT terminal and started taking calls.
On my first break, I asked the floor supervisor, “Have you considered doing this paperless? You’d save paper and have something you can edit in real time.” She said they hadn’t. I asked if I could demonstrate something on my workstation.
She said: “Sure, go ahead.”
And that’s how the daily floor notices went digital.
It proved popular enough that a spare PC was allocated to host the pages. I started building call scripts for Tier-1 issues: winsock.dll failures, PPP authentication, modem negotiation. Step-by-step visual guides with branching logic that showed the CSR exactly what the caller was seeing… on an Intranet webpage in 1996.
Before the guides, certain calls could only go to a few people on the floor who had the settings panels memorized. After the guides, anyone could take them.
Requests for improvements started coming in. I moved the tools onto OS/2 Warp, using REXX, Java applets, and IBM’s native web server. That stack was deliberate: the applications could migrate to AIX, giving enterprise IT a straightforward code handoff if they wanted to formally adopt the system. I soon had a team assisting me in my work.
I added a shared support mailbox so CSRs could answer emails without stepping on each other. Account lookup tools. Then a call disposition form where CSRs clicked a few buttons after each call, feeding a Java applet that gave floor management real-time visibility.
Suddenly three calls about a modem not answering in Georgia weren’t just three calls. Together, they signaled that someone needed to contact the onsite team before the problem spread.
Those efficiencies helped protect our location through successive call center closures. At least three times while I was there, equipment from closed locations was consolidated into ours. That continued after I left.
I went from temp to the end of the Tier-3 escalation chain leading a team of five in about eighteen months, and it started with a question on my first coffee break.
The instinct in any operation is to optimize what’s already there. Better photocopies. Faster distribution. Neater binders. But sometimes the thing you’re optimizing around is the thing that needs to go. And the person who sees it might be the one who just walked in the door, because they haven’t learned to accept it yet.
In late 1996, a temp agency placed me at CampusMCI, a college-focused ISP division of MCI Communications, as a call center support operator. I’d spent two years translating print to web for a gaming magazine I co-founded.
On my first day, I learned that each shift started with a photocopied hot list of known problems. I sat down at a VT terminal and started taking calls.
On my first break, I asked the floor supervisor, “Have you considered doing this paperless? You’d save paper and have something you can edit in real time.” She said they hadn’t. I asked if I could demonstrate something on my workstation.
She said: “Sure, go ahead.”
And that’s how the daily floor notices went digital.
It proved popular enough that a spare PC was allocated to host the pages. I started building call scripts for Tier-1 issues: winsock.dll failures, PPP authentication, modem negotiation. Step-by-step visual guides with branching logic that showed the CSR exactly what the caller was seeing… on an Intranet webpage in 1996.
Before the guides, certain calls could only go to a few people on the floor who had the settings panels memorized. After the guides, anyone could take them.
Requests for improvements started coming in. I moved the tools onto OS/2 Warp, using REXX, Java applets, and IBM’s native web server. That stack was deliberate: the applications could migrate to AIX, giving enterprise IT a straightforward code handoff if they wanted to formally adopt the system. I soon had a team assisting me in my work.
I added a shared support mailbox so CSRs could answer emails without stepping on each other. Account lookup tools. Then a call disposition form where CSRs clicked a few buttons after each call, feeding a Java applet that gave floor management real-time visibility.
Suddenly three calls about a modem not answering in Georgia weren’t just three calls. Together, they signaled that someone needed to contact the onsite team before the problem spread.
Those efficiencies helped protect our location through successive call center closures. At least three times while I was there, equipment from closed locations was consolidated into ours. That continued after I left.
I went from temp to the end of the Tier-3 escalation chain leading a team of five in about eighteen months, and it started with a question on my first coffee break.
The instinct in any operation is to optimize what’s already there. Better photocopies. Faster distribution. Neater binders. But sometimes the thing you’re optimizing around is the thing that needs to go. And the person who sees it might be the one who just walked in the door, because they haven’t learned to accept it yet.