Spalding spends $1 million to rebuild its customer service operation
Mary Lakis walked into a telemarketing minefield a year ago when she became the global customer service director at Spalding Sports Worldwide Inc.
For one thing, the company’s 55-station customer interaction center in Chicopee, MA, was a technological mess. Over the years, Spalding had accumulated 43 different 800 numbers through the acquisition of other sporting goods companies but hadn’t built a reliable system for handling them. In fact, some inbound calls were even routed to individual employees’ desks or automatically sent to voicemail.
One of the first messages she picked up from the general voice-mail box was from an enraged customer.
