Project Brief
At the time of project initiation, CycleHop was a rapidly expanding service based company with active operations in four major cities and nearly a dozen more markets planned in the coming year. Customer service was becoming a significant expense to operate around the clock locally, and the looming expansion, quadrupling the size of the company, demanded a centralized approach.
Initiating Phase
With this project, initiation was reasonably straightforward. As the company was relatively small at the time, the project charter was nothing more than a verbal request, and the stakeholders were merely three other general managers and me.
Planning Phase
This project, more than any other I’ve encountered in my professional career, required significant planning to ship on time and at a reasonable cost. As this was foreign territory for me, with no formal call center experience and no budget to bring on an expert, even as a consultant, most time here was spent examining Enterprise Environmental Factors. Following this self-education, the work that went into developing a Work Breakdown Structure required careful planning as I was developing a product that would facilitate a multi-channel, multi-brand, multi-city, multi-country service operation that never closed once opened.
Executing Phase
The execution echoed the complexity of planning as simplifying processes and procedures had to be done carefully, enabling customer service agents to effortlessly access thousands of knowledge base items, providing resolution to customers’ inquiries quickly, be it via phone, email, social media, or chat. The customer service team would also act as operations dispatch across the US and Canada operations, layering an entirely separate skillset, adding to the complexity.
With this challenging execution process group, the Work Breakdown Structure was revised many times as a result of control quality. As the deadline to ship was unrealistically tight considering the quality demanded on the product, without the funding to execute more quickly, I was able to launch a minimum viable product, servicing only one inbound channel: phones. I launched the remaining channels a few weeks later, bringing the product to completion despite the financial restraints placed upon it.
Project Outcome
The customer service center and product built from this project at the time of my departure served 18 municipalities, nearly a dozen universities, and two private clients while maintaining 60 second call pickup time and approximately 20-hour email response times. After three years of successful operation with the major product and processes still intact, I issued a new project charter in the spring of 2018 to the current Customer Service Manager as the user base has scaled 29X since the initial implementation in 2015. Project planning is currently underway through fall of 2018.
