Edward Watson Email & Phone Number

Crozet, Va

Supervising a busy call center of up to 80 CSRs, planning daily strategy to resolve outstanding contacts. Resolving escalated customer complaints, answering team questions/training issues, resolving billing issues across the TV and Music platforms, System Administrator across several tool sets. Open order management. Selected Contributions:• Helped rebuild the department into a more modern, streamlined and professional contact center. This includes advanced training on new sales platforms, better phone skills, and improving overall quality standards.

Waynesboro

Novelist

Charlottesville, Virginia Area

Supporting multi-location hotel and spa services across the United States, currently using multi-line phone systems to form a “dispatch” area and customer call center to handle requests from national chains.

Charlottesville, Virginia Area

Director of Customer ServicePromoted from service ranks to current position to take the Customer Service department from a small start-up operation to a high quality large service organization. Set standards for high quality customer service which exceeded all SLAs from Merchant Partners. Decreased company turnaround by creating a fun, exciting work place environment that employees wanted to come to work each day. We set higher standards than most service departments and call centers without conforming to the negative images of those workplaces. Selected Contributions:• Guided the department through a 300% increase in customers. Pushed the company’s development cycle to meet the demands of this incredible growth in customer base and did so with marginal increases to staff.• Project management for several new Customer Relationship Management systems within both our company, and later our parent company, PlaySpan. This included deployment and evaluation of several major market CRM tools, as well as internally engineered system tools to improve customer response times and accuracy. These improvement in tools increased company response time • Increased training regimen for new employees and existing employees. This included a better system of communicating changes for merchants/systems, quality testing for CSRs with coaching on how to better handle cases where they were lacking in skill sets. This increased training and education not only improved the quality of our service department, it lead to a strong percentage of promotion from within the department. All lead and management positions have been filled internally, as well as several key promotions to outside the department.• Created the service department from a team of 4, to a peak of 20 (including out-sourced localized support) from scratch. This includes all policies and procedures, internal evaluations, QA, recruitment strategies, budgets, offsite foreign support, offsite Call Center Operations.

Charlottesville, Virginia Area

Director of Customer ServicePromoted from service ranks to current position to take the Customer Service department from a small start-up operation to a high quality large service organization. Set standards for high quality customer service which exceeded all SLAs from Merchant Partners. Decreased company turnaround by creating a fun, exciting work place environment that employees wanted to come to work each day. We set higher standards than most service departments and call centers without conforming to the negative images of those workplaces. Selected Contributions:• Guided the department through a 300% increase in customers. Pushed the company’s development cycle to meet the demands of this incredible growth in customer base and did so with marginal increases to staff.• Project management for several new Customer Relationship Management systems within both our company, and later our parent company, PlaySpan. This included deployment and evaluation of several major market CRM tools, as well as internally engineered system tools to improve customer response times and accuracy. These improvement in tools increased company response time • Increased training regimen for new employees and existing employees. This included a better system of communicating changes for merchants/systems, quality testing for CSRs with coaching on how to better handle cases where they were lacking in skill sets. This increased training and education not only improved the quality of our service department, it lead to a strong percentage of promotion from within the department. All lead and management positions have been filled internally, as well as several key promotions to outside the department.• Created the service department from a team of 4, to a peak of 20 (including out-sourced localized support) from scratch. This includes all policies and procedures, internal evaluations, QA, recruitment strategies, budgets, offsite foreign support, offsite Call Center Operations.

Charlottesville, Virginia Area

• Researched, evaluated and implemented companywide usage of RightNow Web service product, that is still in use with Electronic Arts. This included publishing site content over multiple customer interfaces, training of CSRs in the departments and basic daily admin tasks of the system.• Pushed on RightNow Web’s own development team to enhance the product into what the EA needed to meet the demands of its growing customer base.• Supervised small team specializing in quick and innovative interface designs for the customer support interfaces for EA.com, MotorCity Online, Sims Online as well as several other web portals for the company.• Edited and reworked customer knowledge base to be more user friendly, with a voice towards our customer base. This involved taking information from the various development teams and translating that into instructions/information for our customers.