She calls herself a call center novice. But when Nita Pennardt, vice president of Coca-Cola Enterprises' Customer Development Center in Tampa, FL, developed, strategized, and organized a contact center that in two years has generated more than $188 million in revenue (with $2.2 million generated daily), serves more than 200,000 inside sales accounts, and handles 63,000 inbound service calls per week, Pennardt is no longer wet behind the ears.

With 15 years experience in finance and sales at Coca-Cola, executives asked Pennardt to build a call center in 2003. Her goal was to establish a single point of contact for the company's 20 sales divisions that handle accounts like restaurants, school cafeterias, and vending companies. The other two goals were to cross-train inbound agents and sales reps and to organize all call activities under one roof.

Coke Adds Life to Customer Satisfaction This is Not Your Grandmother's Call Center Bridging the Contact Center Measurement Gap

"By consolidating activity and interaction with our customers, we're able to provide greater degree of quality and consistency," she says. "And by having sales and service reps act as integrated team, they are more effective in serving customers because one individual is able to help them with anything they need."

Pennardt first assembled a leadership team with three regional sales managers in charge of the inside sales reps, and a director of operations who oversees the organizational development manager and the national customer support manager. The goal was to involve every department in the program from the beginning.

To keep the company's customer development center operating efficiently, the call center uses a workforce management tool from Blue Pumpkin, a Witness Systems Company (which competes with Best Software, Ultimate Software, and Workscape, among others), to identify the right people to put in the right place at the right time throughout the course of the day to maintain high service levels with customers. And a performance platform from Knowlagent (which shares the space with Witness Systems, Sivox, and Envision) was installed to bolster agent communication, learning, and knowledge assessment. With it, reps can find such information as a new customer or a new incentive program.

Cross-functional teams
With the goal of blended service, Pennardt created specialized groups called NISE (National Inside Sales Execution) teams. They consist of agents who serve the marketing and sales needs of one particular national customer. "They are intimately familiar with the programs going on with that customer, the products and packages, and any of their special needs -- POS materials, and business-building opportunities that we can help them with," she says. She also has created two special language teams -- for Spanish- and Korean-speaking customers. She hopes eventually to expand those.

The center also began sharing information captured during calls. Agents record customer problems and how quickly they respond to their needs. Coca-Cola then addresses systemic service issues by sharing data at the local level to correct problems. For example, if the center receives routine calls about the same vending machine that is out of stock before the driver can arrive to fill it, Coca-Cola sends that information to the local warehouse and they can change the service routes.

The return
Since taking the first calls in July 2003, Coca-Cola's Customer Development Center has improved in customer service performance. No longer do inbound calls get transferred to a warehouse and lost forever. Pennardt says the single point of contact now addresses all needs. "If we make a routine call on the customer and do order capture and that customer has a problem with the dispensing equipment, the sales rep can take care of that," Pennardt says.

Such changes over the past two years have lifted the company's confidence, prompting the organization to shift a few traditional face-to-face accounts for high-profile national chains to the Tampa center. Pennardt is thrilled, adding, "We're going to continue to put more and more information in the hands of the reps and make their jobs easier, i.e., giving them better opportunities to take care of our customers."