Support Centre
One of the longest projects to take place during my time at Brightview, was also the one that I had the most involvement in. Discussions about how to improve the Customer Support Centres for our VISPs had been ongoing at a managment level for a couple of months. But do to a deadlock with what the call centre wanted to see built, and what the development team were prepared to build, progress was slow. I was asked for ideas on a possible solution by my line manager, and being aware of what was going on I'd had a look around at what some other ISPs were doing and come up with just such an idea. Once we'd talked through the basics of the idea he then asked if I could join him on the next conference call and explain the idea to the call centre.
The initial pitch went well, and so it was then up to me to put the full details of what I intended to see created onto paper, and circulate it to all of those invloved for review. At this point, largely due to the time that the project had already consumed for my line manager as well as other business commitments, I was handed control to manage the development of the project. After a couple of minor tweaks and revisions to my original proposal, the final product had been agreed upon and all that was left was to build it!
The new site had to be able to display different branding for the 5 different VISPs that were active at the time, as well as allow customers to log into the site and show them content specifically related to the settings that were stored in the database, such as product and operating system. There was also a contact form on the site which directed messages to the relevant call centre department based on where the message was sent from within the site.
Traditionally my involvement in such a product would have been limited to building and implementing the front-end code for the site. However, on this project due to limited resources, and the fact that I'd come up with the original plan I also ended up doing most of the ASP code on the customer facing part of the site, as well as a lot of the database work involved, on top of my usual duties with the front-end code.