Transition

At work one of our motto's is 'live with ambiguity'. Sometimes its very irksome, othertimes sublime.

For along time I was on the 'Sales Outbound and Resolution team' (SOAR). This means I would call back potential sales and call back 'customer satisfaction' issues. I was a fixer, I fixed things. In this particular position I shined. Mostly because I was unafraid to break ouside of the box and look for solutions.

This particular program has just gone full circle and I got off the merry-go-round. It used to be that every sales team had a SOAR sitting with them. This became problematic because of misuse by managers and a general feeling of disassociation by the SOAR. A backup for sick days and being overwhelmed was also an issue.

They made some changes and pulled everyone into one Team with one manager. This worked out very well. One team on the floor was making 10% of the comissioned sales and dealing with customer issues that a typical salesperson would be lost doing.

Quantifying this was difficult, sales were put under the original sales reps name. They came up with a few different methods to track SOAR but all were pretty easy to fudge. They also worked to set up some kind of compensation based upon preformance. Then tweaked it every month since.

Due to head count changes the team got smaller and a 'new idea' sprung up that took the SOAR team down to about 1/4 of its original size. Still we did over 10% of the floors sales.

They put in a call back extension that people could call direct into our team and that really did work out nicely. Well as of tomarrow all that changes and each team is going to have a SOAR sitting with them. But, only the new teams. The 'seasoned' people are going to be calling back customers and handling satisfaction issues. With very little to no training on how to do this.

As for me I am going to be a Sales Retention Specialist trying to stop returns from happening. Wish me luck.