Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The calm before the storm

In the last month of my internship, I have been assigned to man the phone for RAC automated vehicle trial which the events company is managing. The type of calls that come through are generally people enquiring about booking for the automated vehicle trial or inquiries about the automated bus. The 'Intellibus' is fully automated, meaning up to 8 people can ride the bus without a driver! The trial commenced August 2016 and will run through til October.

 As the events company is managing RAC automated vehicle trial, they need to log all in and outbound calls. The events company use a software called "Events Air" to log information from the calls such as demographics, time spent on call and contact number. The use of the software was similar to software used in public relations units to monitor and record consumer demographics for the purpose of targeted campaigns and advertisements.

The trial was open to the public and media. The public booked online and received a confirmation email 24 hours prior to the scheduled trial with a map of the route and meeting point in South Perth.

An hour prior to a Tuesday morning trial, RAC sent an email to one of the directors at the events company stating due to technical issues, all trials on the day would be canceled until further notice.
This meant there was a wash of panic over the office as over 30 people were booked into the trials on Tuesday and needed to be contacted immediately. So we immediately started calling people booked on the next session.
Myself and the two directors were calling people, leaving voice messages and as a last resort emailing people that had booked.

This crazy period of the day was similar to the crisis management exercise in Contemporary Practice  and how vital it was to remain calm and keep a note of all actions taken to take control of the situation.
Even during stressful periods, it was imperative that I took a note all the actions made by the directors and the steps they took to control the situation. It was a great learning experience!





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