Ryan CHAN
Business Intelligence Intern,
Customer Experience Planning & Engineering (CEPE) Team
(January 2021 – June 2021)
As I was preparing to embark on my first data-related role as a Business Intelligence intern in the Customer Experience Planning and Engineering (CEPE) team at FedEx, I was excited yet slightly apprehensive. I had just started on my MITB course less than 6 months ago, with no prior experience in this field of work previously at all. Would I be able to competently perform all the tasks that the job demanded? Would I be able to keep up with the learning curve? And most importantly, would I be able to meet the expectations of my boss, my colleagues and myself and bring value to the team?
Fast forward to six-months later however, I found myself on the tail-end of the internship, about to end my stint with a sense of fulfilment and achievement. So how did I navigate this journey from start to end?
How did I find my internship?
I utilised multiple platforms to look for internships, including LinkedIn, recruitment sites, as well as the school’s career services management system, OnTRAC II, where I managed to link up with the FedEx CEPE team. The OnTRAC II platform hosts a diverse range of job and internship opportunities that have been vetted by our internship practicum managers and deemed relevant to our course of study. With that assurance in mind, I was able to focus more on whether the job role was a right fit for me.
What were the responsibilities of the CEPE team? What type of work was I involved in?
CEPE deals with services / operations related to customer experience, including call centre operations, digital customer service operations and premier customer care operations. The team’s role is similar to that of a Business Intelligence team, involving the use of data-driven methods to drive and improve the customer experience operations.
My role in the team was strategically planned to allow me exposure to different facets of the team’s work and devote equal amounts of time to each aspect. They include:
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Data Visualization – Design and build dashboards for management reporting
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Data Engineering – Performing Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) operations and reports automation for data analysis, and build data acquisition pipelines
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Data Analysis – Conduct data analysis on key aspects of customer experience operations to pinpoint challenges and craft solutions to drive growth
What are some of the projects I worked on?
I had the opportunity to work on several projects, each with different objectives and skillset required.
I was given the chance to build a workforce management dashboard that tracks and visualizes call centres’ historical call data and call centre workforce planning schedules against the KPIs defined by management. I was given the lead and involved in the project from conceptualization to obtaining management buy-in to building the product and finally deployment.
I also had the opportunity to create a data acquisition pipeline for our Premier Customer Care department to track their daily tasks and productivity. I took on the task of automating data collection and building the data repository needed to store required data, so that it could be used downstream for dashboard visualization and analysis.
I was involved in a data analysis project, to analyse and propose solutions for the realignment and standardization of the region’s service level targets. Working together with my team, we came up with a solution which integrates cost savings as part of the benefits of service standards realignment.
How steep was the learning curve going into the internship? How did I manage and keep up?
When I first started, the learning curve was undeniably steep, which was not unexpected. I had to tackle the learning curve on two fronts:
Domain knowledge – Customer experience analytics, in particular call centre analytics, involved many metrics which were foreign to me. I had to pick up quickly on the definitions and calculations of measures like service level, average handling time and occupancy etc. Some of the formulas used for calculations like Erlang C required extensive reading up in order to understand.
Programming / Software Knowledge – Being new to data analytics, I was only exposed to a limited number of analytics software. However, there exist many different types of platforms and software used for analytics, visualization and engineering purposes, each with its own unique language / syntax and operating controls. Even within the same language like SQL, there still exists nuances between different software that utilise SQL i.e. I learnt SQL in school using MySQL, but the team uses Oracle SQL, which is slightly different from MySQL. In my case, I was mostly unfamiliar with the software the team used and had to learn them from scratch.
The best advice I can give is to not be afraid of making it a habit to continuously consult your colleagues on issues that you are unclear about, even if it may seem small and trivial. Your colleagues will probably know even better than you the difficulty and effort needed to pick up the required domain and programming knowledge from scratch, and will be more than understanding to your clarifications. And of course, don’t forget the age-old saying “Google (and YouTube) is your best friend”, which is cliched but nevertheless still very true.
Over time I slowly got the hang of it, and at times even found myself leading or driving some of the work discussions for my projects.
What did I learn during internship? Were they useful for my course of study or career prospects?
Apart from picking up new skills in terms of domain and programming knowledge, I was also exposed to best practices in the working world, in terms of work processes and management preferences. For example, while I learned many innovative techniques in data visualization in my MITB course, I also got exposure to how management thinks and what they look for in a visual dashboard. I learnt how to integrate best practices in visual techniques with management requirements to get the best of both worlds.
Project management skillset is also something that is best picked up on the job in the working world. Understanding business requirements and constantly maintaining two-way engagement with stakeholders are some of the most critical and sometimes underrated aspects to a successful project. It is through the projects I worked on that have helped me to truly understand the importance of these values.
Overall, I would say that there was a complementary learning relationship between my internship and my MITB course modules. While some of the fundamental technical skills I picked up in MITB has helped to ease the learning curve when I took up the internship, some of the skills I picked up during my internship has also helped me in my MITB coursework, particularly in one of the SMU-X modules (Digital Transformation Strategy) where I put my project management skills to good use when consulting for an external client.
Challenges in a COVID-19 environment – Working from home
In a COVID-19 environment, the biggest change in working style was having to work from home. For the duration of my internship, I probably worked from home about 80% of the time. It can get especially challenging in data-related roles, where lots of coding and programming are involved. Where in office if we are unclear about anything we can easily approach our colleagues beside us, it is not as easy now. Hence, it becomes good practice whenever you are studying up a topic or project, to first consolidate all the questions you might have, before approaching your colleagues. That will help in terms of efficiency and also be less of an inconvenience to your colleagues.
Final thoughts
The last six months in FedEx has been a very fruitful experience. I not only picked up the valuable hard skills and techniques during my internship, but at the same time the experience has also allowed me to discover more about the type of work that I enjoy doing and would be passionate about. Moving forward, this has helped me to pinpoint more specifically my interests in the data field – I aim to move towards a data engineering role, with an interest to pick up skills in big data technologies. Overall, I had a very challenging yet fun time at FedEx, and can conclude that this was one of the most useful ‘modules’ that I have taken in the MITB program!
Figure 1. Team Lunch with My FedEx Colleagues
