Jan Howard Email & Phone Number

I save people from terrible customer experiences because when your Office products don't work, you can't apply for jobs on LinkedIn. Or update your resume. Or write your term paper. And bad things happen.I work with call centers that support our Consumer customers who have issues with office. I get up every day to make lives for my agents better, to help them get better at solving problems for customers, faster, and connecting with them so those tech support calls aren't as awful as we've all experienced.I write training, deliver training, do quality coaching and data analysis to drive better results. All of this translates to less painful support calls. This is my mission.Also part of the Senior Technical Leadership Program, and Peak Performer Award winner.

You know how you talk to a customer service agent, and they ask you all those irrelevant questions that don't matter? And then they repeat everything you say? And they don't listen?They do that because someone will "mark them down" on their quality review. Isn't that dumb? Doesn't it drive you nuts? Don't you wish you could change it?That's what I did in this role. I worked with an awesome team to completely change how we evaluate and coach our agents in talking to customers and resolving their issues.We did this for the whole wide world, for Office and Windows consumer agents.Oh yeah, and we really do record and listen to those phone calls. Just like the recording says when you call in.

So there's this concept that running a pilot or an experiment should be a repeatable process that delivers statistically significant results that leadership can use to make data driven decisions about what to do next.There's probably a lot of rigor that's needed to really do that, though, and everyone is already really busy doing important stuff right now. So we created a team to specialize in running these pilots in a way that delivers data to show which ideas should move forward and which ones shouldn't.With a new team and a new mission, you're building new processes, networking, doing roadshows to promote the team, figuring out how to be successful and be able to talk about your success to others. It's fun building a new team.

What happens when you call in to customer service for help, but the agent can't help you because their system is down? Or, what if they want to introduce new products, or make other improvements to systems? Who ya gonna call?In this case, you'd call my team. They are the experts in how agents use the tools to help customers, how those tools work, and how they are actually used - because you know it's never the same as how someone originally designed it.These were the days of on-call support to keep the business running, system design meetings, moving from waterfall, to Agile, to Rational Unified project methodologies. It was helping my team be better, to be more. It was promoting many people to new levels, and having the tough conversations managers need to face. As much as I am passionate about customers, it was helping the people on my team that got me up in the morning and kept me up at night. And it is these successes that are my favorite memories.

There comes a time you get to sleep in the bed you make. As a business analyst, I gathered requirements, ran UAT and delivered a new quality monitoring tool. I must have done a good job, because I got invited to come support the tool I just launched. In the course of taking that on, I continued to build the positive relationships I had with my team and quickly grew into a mentorship role, helping advise on day to day activities, set goals and ultimately develop my team's skills.

Gathered and documented business requirements, reviewed and collaborated on functional specifications, created and executed UAT. Performed portfolio management for Customer Care system enhancement requests, developed prioritization and leadership review process.Significant project focused on replacing existing call center quality monitoring software, while integrating complex agent evaluation and audit processes as well as customer survey process and results.

Managed intake of system enhancement requests for private banking trading platform with external vendor. Managed prioritization process and communications internally and externally.