For a Datamax customer with service needs, his or her journey begins with Rachel Acosta.

The 10-year Datamax employee is the ultimate Frontline Worker for the Arkansas Service Department. She dispatches every service call, but she assists her colleagues, absorbs and embraces any number of personalities every day, and delivers a unique, personable experience for customers who are generally down technology-wise.

Front Line Workers must be agile in their workload, and creative in their approach, to ensure that the customer’s journey is successful. Rachel is both of those.

“I joke with Rachel often about her ‘multi-personality disorder,’ simply because she immediately changes her personality on a whim depending on if she’s talking to a sales rep, a service supervisor, or an upset customer. Every person she interacts with, she adapts to. She’s a pivotal key to my department, and it would be very difficult to operate without her,” Arkansas Service Manager Mark McKinney said.

When Mark took over as Service Manager, he fought hard to have Rachel moved from the admin area of the office to his office downstairs. This way, the two could collaborate and remain jointly on top of the minute-by-minute emerging service needs. Once she moved down, it was a game-changer.

“It was a great experience (moving downstairs),” Rachel said. “Before, when I was in Admin, I couldn’t communicate one on one with the manager. Now, Mark can hear everything that is going on. We can discuss something in real-time instead of having to hang up and place another call. It’s a fantastic setup.”

Rachel multitasks (like crazy).

“Oh my goodness. Does she,” Mark says.

Techs calling in, machines being moved, customers having issues, and sales managers coming down with individual questions. And the phone keeps ringing. Mark estimates that the department receives between 1200 and 1700 calls a month, certainly in part due to the recent Baptist Health acquisition.

It’s up to Rachel to keep track of all moving parts.

“Just being able to remember, OK, we’ve got this customer at this location who is having this problem – she sends me an email and off we go. It’s her job to balance the load, and she does a tremendous job with that,” Mark said.

Rachel agrees that she is often doing three or four things simultaneously.

“If you’re not a great multitasker you won’t be great for this job. I may be on the phone while answering emails, and putting in service calls. You just embrace the constant back and forth,” Rachel said.

Rachel communicates tremendously.

Mark says they have customers who call in and speak to Rachel as if they’re friends.

There’s Basil with Kohler Co. in Sheridan. If he doesn’t hear Rachel’s voice on the other end of the line, this customer will ask if everything is OK with her, and why she’s out. There’s Steve with Malverne ISD, who has gotten to know Rachel well over the years. The list goes on.

“You have to make a customer feel like family, like you’ve known them for most of your life,” Rachel says. “If you have a better understanding of them, on a more personal level, I just think the whole relationship between Datamax and that customer’s work environment is so much better.”

How does one do that while juggling multiple tasks at once?

“You have to just make the time. Make the time to make sure the customer feels comfortable with you,” she said.

Rachel constantly sharpens her skillset.

Her skillset improved quickly once she moved downstairs to the service department. When a customer calls in with a fax question, she knows to ask “do you have a dial tone?” “Will it receive and not send? Or neither?” If the call is regarding lines on prints, she knows to ask “Is it on copies but not the prints? Or is it both?” These fundamental questions Fastrack the resolution process for customers.

“I would say that a lot of how I absorb these things is by listening to conversations. Whether it’s Mark speaking with a customer or a supervisor, or one of the technicians; it’s a lot about listening and absorbing all the information.”

When Rachel is out, and the supervisors take on the frontline work of dispatching, they anxiously await her return.

“It’s not that someone else couldn’t do her job, but everything she’s worked for, she knows things to do that others don’t. What she does for this department is pivotal.”

Rachel may not provide final customer resolution, in the same way that an emergency dispatcher doesn’t conduct the surgery. But resolution would be impossible without her. In the case of providing response + resolution, and ultimately, Creating Raving Fans, Rachel is a hero of the Front Lines.