CASE SCENARIO: "The third-quarter quality figures for the customer call center you manage have been posted. Although your numbers looks good, you quickly notice that, compared to other call centers in the company, your ratings for customer service are below average. Given that part of your bonus is tied to these figures, you are obviously concerned and very motivated to fix the problem.

You call your counterparts in the other call centers to see what they've been doing recently and to generate some ideas that might influence customer service. One manager said she instituted a new game called "Answer the Call for Baseball" where the top 10 customer service representatives get to take off work for a midday baseball game. Another manager in a successful call center has increased his monitoring of reps on the phone and is intervening immediately when a rep doesn't perform well. A third manager hasn't done much of anything innovative and said, "I guess my customers are easier to handle than yours." You sit back in your chair, perplexed."

A) What mistakes did you as the manager make in this case?

B) What other information would be useful to know first, what questions would you ask or what information would you seek out in order to frame the problem more accurately? What else could the problem(s) be?

C) Now apply concepts outside of the case: Using course concepts, state a problem you (or your manager) need to solve (ideally work related), highlight some potential pitfalls you or others could run into while making the decision (course concepts) and then take the problem through the 6-step decision making process/model from the text/lecture - make sure to number and label each step. THIS IS YOUR OWN REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE (not the case).