Albert "Al" Silva

Al has worked in service delivery and support organizations for the past 23 years. During his career, he has held a variety of positions ranging from Customer Support Representative, Director of Service Delivery and Support, Director of Project Management, and most recently, Vice President of Operations.  He has also worked for large , decentralized organizations (1000s of people) as well as those in early stage development (40 people). Each of these companies had a call center (TAC) where initial customer call response and trouble shooting of customer problems and inquires takes place. 

He understands that regardless of organization size, efficiency is one of the keys to success.  Defining metrics and measuring of performance becomes invaluable in improving efficiency. By extracting data from the organization’s trouble reporting and tracking system and analyzing this data with an objective viewpoint, he has been able to continuously improve customer interactions with technical support staff and within the company overall.  With this experience, he recognizes the different challenges organizations face at each end of the size spectrum and where the “biggest bang” can be found in terms of efficiency, productivity, and improving the customer experience. 

Examples of projects and responsibilities with which Al has been charged include:

• Traffic modeling across 75+ voicemail systems in a service center.  This involved understanding calling patterns and call volumes in order to recommended resource allocation so as to achieve the desired level of service.  Utilizing PBX ACD reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, he was responsible for ensuring customers did not experience hold times outside the acceptable range and that busy signals where within acceptable industry limits and standards.

• The successful relocation and consolidation of the above 75+ systems from a data center in Tewksbury MA to a Reno NV data center.  This involved the migration of 50,000+ end users over a period of several weeks. He was chosen for this project because he had successfully completed similar migration project for an external customer where analysis of calling patterns was critical.

• Responsibility for the implementation of end customer installations and application configuration, from project assignment through revenue recognition. This role expanded to include management of the Service Delivery and Support organization which included the TAC, System Engineering/Project Management, Sustaining Engineering and training functions.  Here, he was responsible for customers from sale (purchase order) through implementation, project acceptance and support contract renewals.

• Ensuring that external customer help desk calls were properly answered, triaged and dispatched to the correct resources that could resolve issues quickly and effectively.  This was done through ongoing data capture and analysis of customer calls, hold times, trouble categorization, severity assignments, time to closure, trouble ticket aging, etc.  Data was pulled from several areas including the customer satisfaction surveys, trouble ticketing system; carrier network reports as well as individual customer rep work logs in order to cross verify data accuracy.

• Responsibility for all project management activities that lead to revenue recognition but also the technical support group where we took initial customer calls for all issues related to the company’s deployed product set.