Aleksander GroszI make customer service, contact centers and telesales work better.
From building on a greenfield site to transforming what is already there. I have run multilingual outsourcing operations with several hundred staff and built small in-house teams from scratch, selected providers, brought them on board and replaced them. Most recently the focus has been outbound: bringing telesales back in-house from external partners, with our own team and our own dialer.
Up to 370 FTE managed across several providers · one contact center built from nothing · COPC Registered Coordinator
of the table
Where I look first
Two examples from service, one from outbound. In all three the answer sat one step before the conversation: in the definitions, in the planning, in who owns the work. That is where things move fastest.
The first thing I do is separate repeat calls from first contacts. In most reports they count as two contacts rather than one unresolved case, which makes the operation look more productive than it is. A clean contact-reason taxonomy shows which cases are not answered fully the first time, and that is exactly where the second calls come from.
I introduced an AI solution for inbound calls, and it did take noticeable load off the operation. What I mainly learned were the knock-on effects. When the simple cases disappear, everything behind them changes: the mix of the remaining conversations, how long they take, what the job asks of people, and what a good call even means afterward. I now plan for that from the outset.
Three times I turned that into a unit of its own: its own team, its own dialer, clear ownership. Dialing by hand costs half the day in waiting and answering machines, and where outbound is supposed to run alongside other work, there is a good reason every day why not today. With a dedicated team, leads that had been sitting there turned into conversations.
Three fields, all three run operationally
Work I held budget and headcount for. What a working relationship can look like has a page of its own.
Contact center operations
Building and running service units, by phone and in writing, in one language or many.
- Sites built from nothing, up to the first client
- Quality systems agreed with the works council
- Multilingual teams, up to nine countries
Vendor management
Selecting, contracting and steering partners, domestic and international, from both sides of the contract.
- Tenders in Europe, North and South America
- Business reviews and a benchmark across all providers
- Bonus and penalty terms both sides can verify
- Workforce management on the client side
Outbound and telesales
Building in-house units for lead outbound, so that leads left sitting actually get called.
- A dedicated team that does nothing else
- A dialer instead of dialing by hand
- Call order by lead age and reachability
What came of it
Lead qualification brought in-house
- Situation
- The same starting point three times. Leads were there, sometimes plenty of them, but a large share was left sitting. Dialing was done by hand, follow-ups drifted apart, and ownership sat with a team that already had other work. Where providers were involved, they were performing below what they could do.
- What I did
- The same route each time. A dedicated team responsible for lead outbound and nothing else, and a dialer so that the time goes into the conversation rather than into dialing and waiting. On top of that, call order and reachability windows by lead age, coaching at the desk, and a pay model that is only tied to results once the measurement is sound.
Running an international outsourcing operation
- Situation
- Several providers in several markets, with no shared definitions and no dependable capacity planning.
- What I did
- Set up performance management with fixed reporting, business reviews on a schedule, and a benchmark that made the providers comparable with each other. Added a shared metrics glossary, an in-house WFM and real-time team, and ran the selection processes for Europe, North America and Brazil.
A major tech-support account brought up to standard
- Situation
- Operational responsibility for the account of an American premium technology provider, 17 team managers, recertification to the COPC standard due.
- What I did
- Aligned management and quality processes with the standard, recut the span of control, standardized the metrics. Recertification passed.
A contact center on a greenfield site
- Situation
- A logistics company wanted to offer customer service in-house rather than buy it in. What existed was a budget and an empty floor.
- What I did
- Selected and fitted out the site, procured telephony and technology, filled and trained forty seats, calculated pricing and wrote the draft contracts for the first clients. After that, running the operation for pay-TV and mail order.
Longer pieces from the operation
Published in German. Shorter notes on LinkedIn, in German and English.
Interview: „Der Kontaktgrund gehört nicht dem Service“
Three questions from editor-in-chief Alexander Jünger: why service organisations know their contact volume but not the reasons behind it, how bots make contact reasons invisible, and who is accountable for avoidable contacts.
Service Design im Kundenservice: vom Bearbeiten zum Gestalten
Warum die wirksamste Serviceverbesserung oft darin besteht, den Kontakt überflüssig zu machen, und welche Grundlagen dafür nötig sind.
Verbundene Ergebnislogik: Warum einzelne KPIs euch in die Irre führen
Kontrollpaare, Scheinsteuerung und die Frage, warum jede Service-Kennzahl eine zweite braucht, um vertrauenswürdig zu sein.
I have managed providers, and I have led one
I started in 2002 on the phone myself, at an electronics online shop. Then team leadership, building a site, running an operation. Later on the other side of the table: the client who writes tenders, negotiates contracts and steers providers.
Knowing both sides changes how you read a tender, and you know where the provider is doing their sums. You notice it in escalations.
- Over 20 years in contact centers, service and telesales
- Roles at Zalando, Sitel, Convergys, FlixBus, IU and IUNworld
- COPC Registered Coordinator since 2015
- Berlin, German and English
What is on your desk?
One conversation is usually enough to say whether I am the right person. If I am not, I will say so.