What do you do anyway?

I have had a lot of people ask me what I do. I know I touched on this briefly in my early post and its vaguely explained in my profile but, I’ll try to give you a little more information.

I work for an small, independent business. Its me. CL Boardman Agency. I have a home office and previously mentioned cpus, telephone line, blah blah blah. I guess the meat of the question is “Huh?”. I’m an independent contractor, fully licensed under the great State of Indiana and the United States Federal Government. I contract specifically to a corporation who serves as a “hub” for other independent contractors. This corporation holds service agreements with many, many top notch companies. I have chosen a contract to provide services to a communications company. A big one.

I am in my office 7 to 10 hours per day. I am a Quality Enhancement Facilitator. I provide this service in two ways. The first, I offer “real time” support to agents that are servicing the communications company. They are the front line, providing customer support/service. Answering questions on billings, features, services. Trouble shooting devices. Sometimes they get stumped, that’s where I come in. I provide support to them through a chat room.

The second way I facilitate quality is by serving as a contact off line to the representatives. They each have expectations to meet...did they provide good service? Answer questions correctly? Provide the right information? Make the changes they said they would make? I monitor calls, score the calls, provide feedback through email using specific forms, or not. I meet with them in a virtual environment and the telephone.

That’s my day. I listen to recorded calls late at night usually because I can concentrate then. I score them, report back to the representative and let them know where they might improve. They are all independent as well so they can take my recommendations or leave it. But, they do have to meet quality so its in their best interest to work with me on the recommendations.

This is my 4th assignment with the corporation I contract through. I have progressed to this point and did not start out in this role. Had to pay some dues and take some lumps on the way here. I may not be done with the progress either. There are other roles within the corporation that can be managed “off site” or “virtually” and I might be interested in one of those one day.

Its been a real blessing to me. I have made some nice “friends” virtually who are also finding themselves in a great situation. The work can be demanding, its sedentary, it can be stressful. Its rewarding and its nice, so nice, to take a break for a second, like we do in every “job”, to get a drink of water and walk through my home, looking at my things, seeing my family pictures on the wall, the dirty dishes in the sink (What????) and yes, out my window.