|
_____________________ |
____________________________________________________________________ Volume 6; Issue 2 February/March 2003 |
||||
|
** Administrator Visit **
First and Second Decades |
|||||
|
_____________________________________________________________________ Dawn Zimmer - Highlighted
Service Liaison Staff: Developing One Stop Shopping _____________________________________________________________________ |
|||||
|
One of the most
significant reasons for the reorganization at the William J. Hughes
Technical Center was to make things easier for employees to do their jobs.
The idea was to create a centralized customer service area whereby
services can be obtained through a single location (and phone number)
while at the same time providing the customer with a standard delivery
timetable and a clear expectation of the services to be provided.
Through the use of service level agreements with both internal and
external customers and the implementation of one-stop shopping, these
objectives could be achieved. The
key question was “who would lead such an effort?”
To bring some light on these new plans, the Technical Center's senior management brought in the dawn, literally. Dawn Zimmer was hired last October to lead the newly formed Service Liaison Office. In this role, she is responsible for developing the roles of the Business Analysts (formerly Administrative Officers and Program Analysts), Business Integrators and Business Account Managers as well as developing service level agreements with both internal and external customers. Lastly, she is currently heading up the project team to develop and implement One-Stop Shopping. Ms. Zimmer has more than 20 years experience with customer support and has always been up for a challenge. “I think the opportunity is amazing,” said Ms. Zimmer. “The reorganization which combined the service functions into one organization has set the stage for improving operational efficiency which ties very nicely with the Balanced Scorecard implementation. (For more information on the Balanced Scorecard, see the story) “I believe the opportunity exists to implement more standardized policies and procedures, consistent methodologies for providing services and achievement of a higher level of customer support and ultimately customer satisfaction. This will in turn enable us to be thinking strategically about the services we offer and how we can best meet the customers' needs.” Understanding customers’ needs and building organizations to meet them is not new to Ms. Zimmer. She has created similar type organizations for the Gartner Group, GE Capital and, most recently, at Ulticom. While at Ulticom, a network software provider, she ran the company’s customer support organization and was responsible for all service level agreements and professional services. She also built a training organization from the bottom up. Ms. Zimmer began her career as a research associate, but quickly became responsible for running the client support organization, which focused on ensuring that the customers’ needs were met and that they were retaining customers' contract values. Now Ms. Zimmer has brought her expertise to the Federal Aviation Administration and is happy with her decision. “I am glad to be here,” said Ms. Zimmer. “I have an exceptional team of professionals and I am enjoying working with them.” Aside from managing her team at the Technical Center, she also has managerial duties at home. Ms. Zimmer is married and has three children, a boy who is 14 and two girls 12 and 7. As if that were not enough to keep her hopping, she also has two dogs. In her spare time, when she can find some, she enjoys reading, sewing and cooking. Ms. Zimmer says she can balance all of this because of her dual support system. “Having a good support organization on both sides of your life,” said Ms. Zimmer, “generally makes it a little bit easier.”
_____________________________________________________________________ Service Liaison Staff: Developing One-Stop Shopping _____________________________________________________________________
Have you ever needed a
conference room and had to call all over the William J. Hughes Technical
Center to find one? Even before you can start the calls, you have to find
all the numbers to the different conference rooms. The same may be true if
you have a computer problem or need budget questions answered. Wouldn’t it
be great if there was just one number to call that would get you what you
needed or at least to someone that could get you the help you need? The service would be called something like, one-stop shopping. Sound like a good idea? Well it is and the service is on its way to the Tech Center. “Our goal is to create a one-stop-shopping environment where there would be a single phone number for a customer to call with any service request they may have,” said Dawn Zimmer, manager, Service Liaison Staff. “Our requirement is to get the request and provide employees with the desired output within the desired time frame.” This means that employees of the Tech Center will be able to use one number to resolve PC issues, book a conference room, get a white board or take care of anything else that may be needed. Ms. Zimmer says that the organization’s goal is to be the customer service organization for Operations, Technology and Acquisition. She adds that they need to learn and understand the customers’ business and the business requirements. The group is responsible for understanding the business requirements out there and how the OTA service offerings apply to those business requirements. “For example,” Ms. Zimmer said, “if you look at the ACB organization, they are trying to do some different things to really be focused on product and service excellence. There are functions that they need from an operational standpoint to support these products and their overall operations such as funds tracking, personnel request tracking, facilities requirements, etc. Rather then having to build the operational side or the infrastructure to support their business requirements and goals; we can provide that service for them. So one of our goals is to find as many business needs out there and make sure our service offerings are in line with those needs.” Part of the SLS’s service offering is creating service level agreements. “We are trying to create service level agreements between the customers and the OTA organization,” said Ms. Zimmer. “We have a service level agreement with I&S (Innovations and Solutions, ACB) and we are in the process of creating another agreement with the Federal Air Marshals. What we have done is create a catalog of services or operating standards which provide the customer with a description of the service and with a predictable level of delivery for the service. For example, our operating standards for handling a help desk call for the IT group might be to provide the customer with a response within two hours of the initial request. This is something on which the customer can count and OTA must have the processes in place in order to support this delivery standard.” In order to know how effective the agreements are, there must be an evaluation process. “Another thing we’re doing is measuring our performance with the agreements,” said Ms. Zimmer. “An important part of service level agreements is metrics. We need to understand how we’re measuring up. So if we say the IT group is going to respond to a customer within two hours, we need to evaluate how many calls we are getting and how many were responded to within that time frame. Ideally it should be 100%. However, things happen sometimes that will prevent us from meeting that level of service. But we are always striving to meet that ideal number of 100%. We are constantly measuring our performance and reporting those results to the customers.” To this end, Ms. Zimmer is making some additions to the SLS. “One of the roles we are adding to Service Liaison Staff is something called business account managers. They will be account managers who will work with that customer organization to gain an understanding of its requirements and to proactively look for opportunities down the road,” said Ms. Zimmer. “For example, a business account manager working with the I&S organization might find out that they are working on a project today and in six months they’re going to need some lab facilities to support testing for that particular project. So that business manager will come back and say to the people in procurements, ‘hey, they’re going to need 50 new PCs.’ The business manager can then let facilities know that there will be a need for some wiring. He can go to the LAN folks and say they’re going to need some additional bandwidth. So, you can see the business account manager becomes an integral part in managing the customer relationship.” When Ms. Zimmer’s vision for her organization comes to fruition, the OTA will be the one-stop-shopping center and everyone will wonder how they ever functioned without it before. _____________________________________________________________________ |
|||||
|
|
|||||
