A typical day in the life of a 3M call center agent is a lot like spending a not-so-quiet evening with Regis Philbin. The questions keep coming, and the pressure steadily builds.

One caller wants help fixing a laminating machine. Another has a question about the effectiveness of an industrial adhesive. A customer wants to know where she can buy a special type of recording tape. A man in New Jersey needs a copy of 3M's annual report. The next caller wonders why 3M has discontinued its ScotchGuard fabric protection products. Toss me a lifeline, please!

Many Products, Many Questions
Most famous for its Post-it Notes and Scotch Tape brands, 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co.) is a highly diversified company that makes more than 10,000 products. Based in St. Paul, Minn., 3M operates 30 business units, including industrial (advanced adhesives, tapes and abrasives); transportation, graphics and safety (reflective materials, respirators and optical films); health care (drugs, asthma, dental and skin products); consumer and office (tape and Post-it products); electro and communications (insulating products); and specialty material (gases and plastics).

The company's sweeping product range can make life difficult for call center agents, who collectively are expected to provide fast answers to some 1,400 questions per day. "It takes a special type of person to be able to quickly handle business, financial and technical questions," says Paul Guanzini, new business development manager for 3M's Corporate Customer Contact Center.

As 3M began launching more sophisticated and complex products during the 1990s, the scope and pace of customers' questions began taking a heavy toll on call center agents and managers. Training agents to handle questions relating to software, hardware and consumer goods as well as financial and other miscellaneous queries was becoming impossible, says Guanzini. "It was very difficult for our people to be trained across all those product lines and to be able to talk intelligently with knowledgeable users." To keep pace with customers' increasingly complex questions, agents began decorating their workstations with technical bulletins and product literature; some even resorted to using Post-it Notes as memory cues to products, problems and solutions. "Although we're quite proud of our Post-it Notes, it wasn't a very efficient way of providing support," says Guanzini.

Despite their best efforts to each field an average of 52 calls a day, agents had to escalate 18 percent of those calls to experts within the company. Customers were forced to repeat their stories to each agent and expert with whom they spoke, and they complained of incomplete information or answers that varied depending on which agent they talked to. Some calls took days to resolve, frustrating callers and agents alike. With no way of knowing that someone else had found a solution to a problem, agents were duplicating efforts and taking up experts' time over and over to answer the same questions. The volume of calls escalated to experts in the company's R&D labs was causing a drain on lab productivity. And for a company whose stated goal is to earn 30 percent of sales from products developed within the past four years, anything that hampers innovation is cause for concern.