Portfolio Case Study · Anonymized
Customers were bouncing between teams — and the fix wasn't the routing rules.
A service organization was seeing customer cases handed off to local teams by default, even when the issue could have been resolved centrally — creating avoidable delay and repeat contacts.
- Cases bounced between centralized care, specialists, and local teams
- Customers repeated their issue every time ownership changed
- Local teams absorbed work that wasn't really theirs to own
- Leadership had no baseline for why handoffs kept happening
The visible issue was routing. The deeper issue was that agents didn't consistently have the guidance, ownership clarity, or confidence to resolve or correctly route the work.
System labels didn't explain why work moved.
The case categories described how the system labeled work — not what customers were actually calling about, why an agent chose to hand a case off, or where the resolution guidance had broken down. So the analysis started somewhere different: instead of internal category labels, it followed the language customers actually used, then traced how that connected to where work moved and what guidance the agent had in hand.
The handoff pattern was a signal, not the whole diagnosis.
Connecting data that normally stayed siloed — reports, history, call summaries, and knowledge content — surfaced patterns no single source showed on its own:
Language revealed real patterns
Customer language showed issue patterns the category structure didn't explain.
Repeated ownership changes
History showed work reassigned repeatedly, even when routed correctly the first time.
Procedure, not resolution
Knowledge articles often described steps, not how to actually resolve the issue.
Ownership wasn't clear
Decision rights between centralized, specialist, and local teams weren't defined.
Turnover widened the gap
Newer agents had fewer resources to resolve issues without handing them off.
Before
A handoff felt safer than resolving an issue with incomplete guidance. Local teams absorbed work by default.
After
Clear ownership rules and resolution-focused knowledge content make the correct next step obvious.
Make the correct next step easier to recognize.
Recommended actions were designed to reduce unnecessary handoffs and strengthen enablement, alongside a measurement baseline:
Handoffs per case
How often a case changes ownership before resolution.
Resolution time
Time from intake to closure, by issue type and route.
Knowledge coverage
Whether guidance exists and supports first-contact resolution.
Agent confidence
Where agents still lack clarity that system data alone won't show.
Public, anonymized portfolio case study. Company names, internal details, and data values have been generalized. My role: root-cause analysis, stakeholder-ready recommendations, and measurement design. The project established a baseline and recommendations; post-implementation results were not available because the work concluded during a broader organizational downsizing.
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