Hello world!
”henlo boomer”
It’s Pajamas Friday!
“wasnt yesterday pajamas thursday”
YES! Every day is Pajamas ***day when you work from home!
Last night I had a very weird dream – I was back at my old office, sort of, but everything was changed slightly and remodeled so that I couldn’t find my way around. Everyone else was very, very dressed up; I was wearing pajamas.
Just like every day, really. I used to get dressed before logging in, usually jeans, a T-shirt, maybe a pullover if it was chilly, and comfortable shoes. But for the last few months (this started last summer) I’ve just been… wearing pajamas. Seems the thought of facing the arduous 20-step commute from bed to desk was part of this trend, even though I always make a pit stop and also head downstairs for breakfast, coffee, and some catch-up reading.
After my weird dream last night, which had a lot more odd details that still make me chuckle, I woke at about 5 or 530am, somehow convinced that it was Saturday morning. I asked my husband David if today was the day we have an early family event to go to an hour away, and he replied “no, that’s tomorrow.” So I went to sleep again.
Then my iPhone alarm went off – the one that tells me it’s time to start my work computer and get ready to book corporate travel stuffs. WOOPS. Frantic rushing around ensued, as the next alarm goes off at 705am when I’m supposed to be “ready.”
Well, I made it to work in time. More or less, but in the rush I had to skip breakfast and coffee until break time.
Ever since last March, I’ve been attached to a working group at my company that specializes in booking “relocation” travel for more than one account. This “relo team” is a new solution to an old problem – normal business travel is relatively quick and easy to book, but corporate relocation is a niche speciality and it’s very time-consuming. A “relo” call or request via email can go for a very, very, very long time, and have a lot of fussy details. In a corporate travel environment where agents are supposed to keep calls shorter than 10 minutes to stay on track, people above my pay grade decided to consolidate agents who could handle “relos” into a team.
Previously, every team whose account or accounts had some relocation travel (which can either be direct requests from the traveler, or through an intermediary) would designate 1 agent to handle the “relos” in addition to normal call and email handling. But putting several such specialists on a team, supporting multiple accounts’ relocation bookings, meant more coverage, and the agents work more or less exclusively from emailed requests. Thus regular line agents aren’t interrupted by long calls for family relocations, and the relocation specialists get more done by having written requests with as much detail as possible.
As in, not having to drag all the name spellings, special requests, ID numbers, dates, times, and destinations from a caller in a kind of travel agent interrogation.
So far, with some bumps and and scrapes, it’s worked pretty well. Currently, our team has 4 agents, and we support 7 accounts. I’m… somehow… the one that understands the weird quirks of how to get Salesforce email requests to appear in our “inbox,” which is really just a filtered view. Even with filters that have been tuned and tinkered with, some accounts’ requests stubbornly refuse to be “Identified.” So I’m the one that routinely does manual searches to find and identify our email UFOs.
We started with 3 agents and 3 accounts – and we were two veterans and one agent best described as “unseasoned.” After a few months, the other veteran took retirement, and we picked up another experienced agent who’s a technical whiz that finds phone work stressful, and later still we welcomed another relatively new agent who’s a very quick study and eager to learn. So, YAY again. We train by sharing Zoom calls and recording them to show the process for booking each account and have shared reference documents to keep everything straight.
Just when things got normalized again, we picked up 5 more accounts over about a 2 month period, so we did a lot of Zoom training and reference file updating. Every account has different quirks, but they all have intermediary companies sending us the requests – the intermediaries are responsible for a lot of HR stuff things like housing and documentation and compensation in the background.
It’s complicated.
Then around the new year, the least experienced agent spun off to work normal business travel calls and emails on a single account (a better environment to gain experience). And we gained another veteran (YAY) who also found taking calls stressful and bad for her health, and we know each other from working at that same office in a neighboring suburb that I dreamed about. So YAY to having another veteran, too.
So that brings us to 4 agents, 7 accounts, and I hope no more new accounts for a long time, until we are all comfortable and know the ropes. I still have to stop and check the deets on the 4 newest accounts; the first 3 accounts, I had already been doing relocations on, or had some familiarity on the accounts.
And with all the stress of trying to monitor the email volume and distribute the new requests fairly and update the filters and shared spreadsheets… well, getting dressed in the mornings was low on my list of priorities. Thanks to my multi-track and highly distractible brain, I seem to be the most productive of all of us so far, though I have hopes that I’ll be overtaken by the others so that it evens out. I’m also somehow the designated “weird customer service problem de-tangler.”
One interesting thing is that we’re scattered all over; it’s lucky that my newest teammate is local to me and we worked in the same office. Our other teammates are located in New Jersey and Manila – our Filipino colleague gets stuck with the closing shift because of his time zone, and he can’t support one of our accounts because he’s not sitting in the US, and there are US government contracts with that account. So the rest of us handle that one, and all seem to be muddling along well enough now.
Another interesting thing is that one of our accounts is a multinational (well, they all are) and there’s a fifth teammate that only handles requests for that company’s non-US based employees, because she’s a native speaker of their primary language.
Last week, she called for help, because suddenly they had 15-20 new requests, and their process is very… complicated and painstaking. So we were asked to pick up a few requests each and the learning curve was about vertical. But we got through it and she’s back on track. I just hope we don’t see another surge like that soon.
Because of my early-shift schedule, I’m off at 330pm my time, and… honey, I’m home! It’s nice to have the afternoon/evening time to myself, but Fridays are the best.
Especially the ends of Fridays that you woke up thinking were Saturdays.
