Projected annual sales decline required right-sizing customer support businesses. However, time constraints required that business moves across centers and between departments be complete within 60 days. This required synchronization and clear direction in order to maintain ongoing business operations.
Established daily conference calls that included all impacted business partners at each center. Developed and implemented detailed time and action plans and reviewed contingency plans. Allocated training resources, laid out new floor plans, coordinated associate and lead preferences for new assignments, and communicated with external business partners.
Completed business moves within the required timeframe, impacting 550 associates across four call centers with projected annual savings of $3.75 million. Achieved objectives by rising to a significant challenge and tackling and coordinating a major, multi-site training effort within a tight timeframe.

Customers frequently shopped for items in-store that their preferred store location might not carry, or often the item was out of stock in their desired color or size. Merchandise assortments varied from location to location, and the online selection differed from that found in-store.
Led team that supported associates during a pilot test that enabled store-selling associates to access stock from macys.com through their POS terminal. Initiated a hotline for questions and answers concerning the process, as well as post-sale customer service for issues related to these multi-channel orders. Established best practices for all anticipated situations that included short ships, wrong items, and price discrepancies between the site and store. Trained customer service associates, ensuring that they understood the complexity of this new selling channel.
Facilitated pilot program that generated $10 million in sales during the five-month, 65-store test, and plans were enacted to begin a rollout to the next set of stores. Demonstrated ability to propel corporate goals and foster positive change by providing vision and direction in training and support initiatives.

There was little to differentiate the cosmetics/fragrances business from the competition, and business was stagnating. 60% of the sales in the cosmetics/fragrances area are on third-party cards or cash/check, making it difficult to capture sales for loyalty or frequent shopper promotions.
Assembled a multi-department team to design specifications for a new frequent shopper program and supporting system. Identified opportunity to include existing, manually tracked frequent shopper programs for hosiery and lingerie. Led system development team to test and validate the new system. Conducted pilot in five stores, compiled and analyzed results, and completed ROI to support program rollout.
New frequent shopper program enabled either upgrades for existing Macy's accounts or enrollments in a "club" shopper card for customers without an account. Program grew at a phenomenal pace and reached 1.3 million members within the first 18 months. Used ability to problem solve, strategically enact a plan, and head cross-functional teams to drive success in this project.

Macy's purchased the 325,000-account credit portfolio of Lamont's department store. The existing project management staff was assigned to other high-profile projects. Asked to serve as project manager to lead a 12-member team of department representatives from Macy's Systems Group, Credit Risk, Collections, Customer Service, Credit Marketing, Legal, and Finance, as well as representatives from the holding company for the credit portfolio conversion.
Contacted all impacted areas and secured representation for the project team. Created project charter and requirements with input from the entire team and developed a time and action plan. Chaired weekly calls to review the project's progress and followed up between weekly meetings on items that were overdue.
Converted 325,000 accounts within the project timelines. Received Macy's Extreme Award and stock options in recognition of performance. Employed abilities in influencing and motivating others to drive project and team coordination, which were vital to reaching project objectives.

Company handled back-office billing adjustments with a cumbersome, manual method. Paper correspondence requests were physically moved from the mail-sort station to individual representatives, and monitoring work progress was very difficult. The same functions were handled at three separate call centers, each serving separate divisions of Macy's, Inc., and procedures and manual processes were not always consistent.
Directed team responsible for defining the requirements for a new automated workflow system that incorporated imaging technology. Defined new best practices for each work function to ensure consistency and ease in writing new requirements. Coordinated project requirements with our in-house programming staff.
Increased efficiency 21% on average across all functions in the first release and reduced turnaround time 48% across three sites versus the old manual batch process. Drove results through focus on continuous improvement throughout the project lifecycle, even delivering subsequent releases of our workflow processes with better improvements in productivity by leveraging more automation.

Bloomingdale's By-Mail order entry and customer service was supported by a small, standalone call group located in the Cheshire, Connecticut warehouse. The operation had no backup, was frequently impacted by winter weather, and served a single function. It was determined that the operation would move to two Macy's, Inc. call centers. The existing call group consisted of subject-matter experts, and none of the existing associates or members of management chose to relocate to the call centers in Ohio and Arizona.
Initiated a weekly conference call with the existing management and new call center directors in Ohio and Arizona. Established a time and action plan, which included all components to support the business move such as training, staffing, telecommunications, systems support, documentation for existing functions, and capturing historical reporting. Directed team that spent two separate weeks working with the special functions' experts in Cheshire, reviewing existing documentation, and creating new procedures as required ensuring everything was captured.
Completed business transition within the communicated time and action plan, delivering $1.3 million in first-year cost savings through leveraging resources between the two call centers and across existing functions. Service-level standards also improved versus historical levels, and the business exceeded sales goals. Automated upsell offers for the order input process on phone orders, resulting in an 8% increase in average order value. Employed skills in gaining trust and cooperation from staff, keeping communications open, and remaining positive and thankful for their time.

Based on growth in new ecommerce businesses, Tempe site was selected to provide customer service support in addition to the existing facility in Mason, Ohio. Establishing new department required hiring and/or transferring new staff to support the operation.
Worked closely with other department heads within the call center to identify new key team members. Coordinated transfers into new start-up business with new hires to fill their prior positions for smooth transition. Involved new team in daily status meetings and instilled a sense of pride in being selected to support the new ecommerce business.
Team obtained highest results at the 1,200-member building in the first two year's community outreach/fundraisers. Productivity results rose to 10% to 15% better than the other call centers for comparable work categories. This scenario reveals a deep understanding of how important it is to blend new associates who bring fresh experiences and viewpoints to identify new opportunities.

Annual sales growth of 30% to 70% for macys.com increased inquiry rates and strained resources for customer service. Incidentally, growth in the inquiry rate exceeded that of sales, as many are not directly related to the ecommerce business. Customers sought additional contact methods to place/service their orders based on new processes being utilized by industry leads such as Amazon.com.
Completed in-depth analysis of customer inquiries to determine root cause of top inquiry types. Established task force that included site design, marketing, customer service, and fulfillment to identify and implement solutions to key drivers. Executed solutions including changes in site checkout, additional product information, improved fulfillment compliance, and additional self-service information/steps on the site for our customers.
Acquired immediate reduction in inquiry rates and sustained reductions year-over-year. First-year reduction brought inquiries per thousand orders down from 1,150 to 840, a reduction of 27%. Inquiry analysis proved to be very successful in determining the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and in developing solutions.

The First Data Resources (FDR) system used to service our private label Visa cards did not provide the flexibility needed to support proposed marketing efforts. However, updates to the FDR system were expensive and difficult to schedule. Thus, modifying the interface between the FDR system and our internal marketing systems was becoming complicated.
Co-directed a project team that transitioned our private-label Visa card program from FDR to our own proprietary system. Defined requirements for new features to support the Visa product, proposed marketing/promotions support, and developed scope document. Created new accounts and credit extension algorithms and worked with risk and fraud groups to create a new account protection component. Coordinated system testing as design was completed, validated new features, and audited integrity of the data. Partnered with Fifth Third Bank to provide integration for authorizations in the Visa system.
New system was completed, tested, and in production within the project charter's six-month timeline, and the new features and marketing components supported a two-fold growth in the Visa card membership within the first two years. Estimated net savings from discontinuing the FDR system maintenance agreement after considering costs and support for the internal system was $127,000 per year. Demonstrated proficiency in data mapping to ensure all the data was captured for every record as well as in team building to pull a large number of participants together from many areas.

Macy's launched a private label Visa program to generate customer loyalty. Expenses varied significantly from the original budget. Customers earned rewards through the new Visa card program for purchases made at Macy's stores and external to the stores. The same drivers were used to develop the original budget as were in place for our proprietary accounts. Struggled to identify if another set of drivers would better determine budget performance.
Using multi-variant repression analysis, sorted through a series of potential drivers to find the best combination to create a budget during the high growth period. Applied new method to the historical data from the past year to validate the new model.
Budget compliance improved 12% over the previous year's variance. Drove project to success by grasping how crucial it is to refresh data and run new calculations to account for changes in behaviors, especially in budget models that include sophisticated expressions to forecast volumes. Demonstrated familiarity with the way budget drivers can be impacted by a variety of external sources, including changes in marketing or promotions, economic conditions, and changes in credit terms.

Hiring staff for peak fall volumes was challenging due to increased sales growth of the macys.com business. Many departments in the call center compete for applications during the primary hiring season to prepare for fall and holiday sales. Budgetary constraints prevent hiring too early in the season to spread out the timing of new employee intake.
Leveraged an existing relationship with HCL Technologies, an existing vendor Macy's was using for outsourcing for credit and collections customer service. Within four months, team was able to complete an inclusive time and action plan, establish service-level standards, negotiate a new contract for the macys.com phone/email customer service support, prepare new training material, and train the initial staff of 30 agents by early summer to test the outsourcing strategy. Oversaw on-site and remote management of the new team and spent five weeks in Noida, India, supporting the process. Successfully completed initial test and expanded the outsourcing effort to 75 positions for the peak holiday season.
The initial test was successful, and the outsourcing effort was expanded to 75 positions for the peak holiday season. Delivered a 27% savings the first year versus operations within our own call centers. Achieved results by identifying and implementing cost-effective solutions and managing vendors in the contract renewal process.

Bloomingdale's By-Mail order entry and customer service moved from the fulfillment center to the call center. Yet, existing staff were rated on their customer service performance while new business was driven by sales. Associates were slow to embrace new sales role, and existing performance measurements for their reviews were weighted heavily on average handle time (AHT).
Evaluated performance measurements and point weights assigned to each component of the associate's quarterly evaluation. Changed the key measure of productivity from AHT to average sale, and built a performance scale based on the first three-months' performance. Based scale on the movement up or down from the average, so as the entire team improved and the scale could move upward to support an ongoing growth in sales.
New performance measurement gave the associates more time that they needed to develop a rapport with their customers when taking orders, and average sale increased 12% from our initial start-up period. Periodically review performance measurements with current job responsibilities to ensure that the key drivers match the duties and drive desired outcome.