We got a call from Daryl the Dispatcher with a special request for our services at a company called Toll Free Support who made their mark by offering toll free tech support to the callers while charging the backend company either by the minute or by the call.
Last year we helped setup their two big accounts, Intel and IBM, so we already knew the people. The Intel contact was nice lady named Li Xu and the IBM contact was Radjendiramane Venkatachalapathy. We called him Radj and we called her...Li. Right off the bat Charlie took a liking to Li but seemed to resent Radj for making us type so many characters in an email address.
Intel was one of the companies that paid by the call and IBM paid by the minute. There were two databases, one for the total phone calls taken every day and another for the written reports entered by the workers. Intel didn't care about the written reports, they only looked at the phone call totals. IBM on the other hand only wanted to see nice long written reports justifying the minutes and never asked to see the phone call numbers.
The two databases came up with the same numbers every day but it was clear there was something wrong due to the large number of complaints from dropped calls and people who swore they had called before but there was no record of them in either database. It may seem primitive now but they had no reason to compare the two databases. It would be hard to do anyway because the two didn't share the same data types and it would have taken lots of work to make the simple comparison.
We spent our first day walking the main floor where all of the tiny cubes were lined up in a big "L" shape with a row of offices all along one wall where the senior Level 3 experts were still just as crowded with three people in a small office, but it was still an office. Charlie soon lost interest on the main floor and from the second day on concentrated on the offices where he easily disarmed each group as he asked how they liked the products they were supporting while offering advice on how to handle tough situations.
He also kept talking Li into taking us to lunch onsite at the Intel campus a few blocks away, which first happened when we went for training at the beginning of the contract. I didn't think the Intel cafeteria was that good but Charlie couldn't get enough.
We finally got back from lunch on the fourth day when Charlie announced he had solved the mystery. Once again he walked straight up to the problem knowing the majority of the users on the open call floor had already been eliminated it had to be the people in the offices. All he had to do was get them talking and sure enough they were so proud of their achievements they couldn't help but brag even if it meant exposing their crime.
It all started quite a while back with only two workers. Dennis was on the Intel team and several times a day he would take the time to enter a written report, but the rest of the time with the easy calls he just took the next call and kept going with no written reports. Meanwhile, several times a day Christine would get flustered and double-click her phone which would dump one caller and skip to the next and then later she would take the time to enter two reports anyway. The dropped call didn't last the required two seconds and would not register in the days totals which is why they were cancelling each other out. He had calls with no reports and she had reports with no calls.
They were both successful in their own group, Dennis taking big numbers of calls albeit without written reports and Christine was famous for such great written reports though there were no calls to go with them. Because of their success they were each given an office with two assistants who in turn each soon learned the same bad habits and before long there were six experts adding to the overall problem.
In truth all of the guilty users figured the Company knew what was going on all along. And even though the Company now knew the truth beyond a doubt the only steps they took was to have Christine's team to stop taking calls and start writing reports for Dennis and his crew. We gave a recommendation to make the two databases compatible and start including all calls in the phone report, even those lasting less than two seconds.
Afterward Charlie told me he knew the solution on the first day but it took four trips to the Intel cafeteria to finally get his fill.
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