|
A while back I was working on a logistics follow-up system at a call center.
The system would fetch the logistics data from the different logistics partners and chew on it for a while, trying to determine which ones were "delayed", and burp out "events" that humans would see and act on. Usually by calling or e-mailing the customer to tell them there would be a slight delay, and giving a reason why. In the rare event the customer called the call center first, they could look up the logistics and tell the customer exactly what was going on with their repair or exchange or whatever. All in all it was a fun little system to work on, and I enjoyed it a lot. What made it worth doing, even though it was a giant corporation's call center, was that my (shared) office was right next to the actual team actually working with the tool. I smoked cigarettes at the time, so it was not uncommon for me to take little smoke breaks with the actual users. At first they were hesitant to try and push "work questions" on me during my break, but I assured them that it was fine. They'd bring up those tiny little things that never get fixed in systems like this. NDA prevents me from going into any kind of detail, but it was little stuff like Olaf's New Menu Item. Working that closely with the Actual Users was very liberating, and I think it alleviated a lot of their frustrations to have developer access, too. That said, this team was maybe 50 people. When this "preemptive logistics issue team" model was rolled out world-wide, I had already left the organization for entirely unrelated reasons, and I don't think I would have given all those people direct access to me on my breaks like that. It works well, at certain scales, though! |