Title: Project Manager

Company: Cisco

Location: Raleigh, N.C.

Mary Paige Forrester began in the call center operations arena in 1992 with The Shubert Organization: Tele-Charge in New York. There, she managed 80 direct and 175 indirect associates, including four supervisors and a team of customer service representatives. In 1997, she moved to Wilmington, N.C. where she worked as the Customer Service Manager for the Bedford Fair Apparel, Inc. contact center. Ms. Forrester managed more than 80 service and sales associates at any-given time, lowering the employee turnover rate from 80-percent to seven-percent, while leading a 300% personal buildup. While at Bedford Fair, Mary Paige developed her first employee incentive program. This program has since been modified for implementation in various industries, mentioned in other incentive guides, and published on several occasions. Following her time at Bedford Fair, she spent 7 years with the State of North Carolina, serving initially on the project start-up team for the Child Support Enforcement Contact Center, and later as the Technical Manager, System Administrator and Operations Consultant for the facility, and led the effort to expand the center by adding another contact center in the facility to support contacts for EBT/Food Stamps.

Throughout her career, Mary Paige has continued to use the skills she’s learned, while making every effort to add new ones. She served in a 2 year federal appointment for the Department of Homeland Security as the Program Manager for TSA’s Contact Center Program, then founded and still serves as director of her own independent consulting company, “Contact MP Consulting”, providing proven expertise in operations, technology, sales, customer service, and quality assurance. She also spent time as the Director of Contact Centers for Maximus Federal Services Division before returning once again to her home State of N.C.

The past several years, Mary Paige has worked as an AS project manager at Cisco and Dimension Data. She returned to Cisco in January of this year. ,. She is the founder of “Contact Centers Operations and Technology Executives and Experts in Raleigh NC”, a group for networking and sharing knowledge with industry experts and professionals. Mary Paige also wrote and published “Contact Center: 101,” a training manual for those building business basics and the nature of contact center operations as well as a white paper on “Contact Center Staffing Basics”

In 1989, M.P. (as she is known by many) graduated from Wake Forest University with a Bachelor of Arts, earning Dean’s List status. She went on in 2000 to earn training in systems administration through Avaya University, and has spent time pursuing MBA coursework. She would like to be remembered for making a difference in many lives by having created opportunities, creating employee development and team building programs, and as being an overall team player who enjoys what she does. Collaboration is something Ms. Forrester considers to be of utmost importance, along with diversity and differing viewpoints.