(Heidi Huber, John Rosenbaum, Amy Stokes, 2002)
Kodak maintains two support centers across the nation. These centers receive calls from hospitals and clinics worldwide. The call center in Dallas is made up of two levels. Level One takes calls directly from the customer and attempts to solve the problems through standard troubleshooting. The purpose of this first level is to filter out the simple problems from the more complicated ones. Less skilled and lower paid technicians handle this in order to take the load off of the higher skilled and higher paid technicians in Level Two and in turn lowering Kodak's support costs. One problem that we felt was relevant was that employees were underestimating their actual applied work time. Another problem that we felt was evident was teamwork within a case. Only the person who closes the call in Vantive, the computer call tracking system, gets credit for the call. Also, discussions between colleagues about work related problems or cases are never acknowledged or recorded. Additionally, there were reported problems with dialing into the necessary equipment to fix the customer's problem.