The Call Center Agent

A call center agent takes a customer call about a failing blood analyzer system.

In addressing the customer’s complaint, the call center agent does the following:

• Enters a service request, recording details about the product and the failure.

• Works with the customer to troubleshoot the problem, searching the solution database for possible solutions. In this case, he finds a solution document about running a diagnostic test. The test does not resolve the problem, but it does indicate the repair that is needed.

• Creates an activity plan—a list of predefined activities—to dispatch a service engineer to the customer site.

• Dispatches a service engineer to make a repair to the analyzer.

• Sets up an RMA (return materials authorization) to return the cartridge and reagents that were in use when the analyzer failed.

• Reviews the report of the work done by the field engineer.

The call center agent has been trained to identify calls as potential complaints. He recognizes that this customer’s problem needs to be escalated as a product issue. Before escalating, he reviews the information entered in the service request, making sure that the service request is classified correctly, for example, with accurate types and codes. When the call center agent creates the product issue from the service request record, the appropriate data is transferred from the service request to the product issue record.