A Ringing Endorsement: Using Six Sigma to Improve Call Center Operations
When was the last time you called a company and got connected to their call center? Were you stuck on hold for what seemed like an eternity? Or was the service representative less than helpful? Let’s face it. Call center performance can make or break any service provider’s customer loyalty ratings. Customer service representatives need to be able to answer the phone. They need to resolve questions quickly. Hold time needs to be minimal and at or under the customer’s expectation. Yet these important metrics, taken alone, with little or no regard to other client-affecting service level indicators, can lead to a loss of business. I read an interesting case study recently about a call center in that predicament. At first, call center leadership didn’t realize that the center’s performance was a problem – until there were rumblings that the organization’s contract was about to be cancelled because of poor service. When faced with this issue, many call centers just lay off staff in an attempt to increase productivity of the remaining group, or try to improve results by forcing people to be on the phone even more. This call center took a difference approach. They enlisted the help of a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) expert to improve their performance. The call center began collecting data around its operations and what customers wanted. The results were eye-opening: Most calls that could not be resolved on the first call required some research by the service representatives. The service representatives were primarily judged on whether they were available to answer calls. This limited the time they could devote to research open issues. As a result, many calls that could not be resolved right away were often never resolved. Customers whose inquiries were not answered within a few days would call back. This increased the call volume, increasing the numbers of calls that could not be resolved on the first call, and led to multiple entries in the computer system for the same problem. Baseline data showed that the call center was achieving only a 50 percent first-call resolution rate and 62 percent five-day resolution rate. Furthermore, service representatives with the highest available-to-answer rates had the lowest resolution rate. Interestingly, there was no correlation between available-to-answer and first-call resolution – so just increasing the time that people were available to answer calls would not necessarily drive up the first-call resolution rate. The call center decided to implement several improvements: They divided employees into two groups. Part of the staff would only take calls and the rest would do the research to resolve the issues. Representatives rotated through the two groups, with daily metrics designed for success, collected individually and reported in a central location. Significant drops in first-call resolution now immediately trigger follow-up action. The call center’s IT department tweaked the computer system to utilize an unused field in the screens to capture issues needing research and the age of those issues. After four days, calls that were not resolved were forwarded to the leadership team for action. Within weeks, the first-call resolution rate dramatically increased from 50% to 90% and the five-day resolution rate rose from 62% to 98%. LSS can be a great tool for getting call center performance back on track. By focusing on what the client needs, developing a process around those needs and tracking key performance metrics, a call center can become a true asset to the organization as a whole. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes...
Read MoreFlavor of the Month Syndrome
There are a lot of things that sound good, and may be very good for a short term, but overall, they don’t last. We noticed this on our recent trip to the State Fair. We found deep-fried brownies, deep-fried Pepsi, and even deep-fried Kool Aid – about anything you can imagine had been deep-fried. Each of these stations had a few novel-seekers in line. However the longest lines were at the more tried-and-true vendors, such as tenderloin sandwiches and grilled cheese sandwiches. How can you go wrong with those? Similar to fair food, many businesses adopt business plans that are the deep-fried flavor of month syndrome. They may sound good on paper, but they really do not have any lasting value. It is imperative that Continuous Improvement (CI) programs be founded on principles to ensure their sustainability. These principles include executive/managerial support, employee education and involvement, and the right goals. Without each of these three components, a CI program is assured to fail. First, it is important that a company’s leadership team supports the CI program. Often significant changes are required in business practices. Without management support, these cannot occur. It is also important that management provide ways to support their CI teams by eliminating road blocks and helping to gain buy-in from hesitant stakeholders. Second, it’s important that employees understand the basics of a CI program and truly be involved in it. It can’t be just a few people orchestrating an improvement plan that ultimately will affect everyone. The third and most key ingredient is the setting of proper goals. Too many times, employees see a CI program as a methodology for reducing the workforce and/or slashing budgets. This should never be the goal of a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project or program. LSS is designed to reduce waste and eliminate errors. By combining these two aspects in its goal-setting, the company can be much more productive and therefore save money. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreModel Cells to Start a Lean Journey
ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value recently shared an interesting case study about a large California hospital system that found a unique way to replicate exceptional patient care across its many service sites. The Palo Alto Medical Foundation for Health Care, Research and Education (PAMF) is a well-respected health care organization serving the health needs of more than a million patients who live in four counties in the San Francisco Bay area. PAMF employs 1,500 physicians and approximately 5,000 employees across more than 40 different locations. Like many large health care organizations, PAMF’s rapid growth in recent years led to consistent care quality across the organization, but the patient experience varied. Yet patient satisfaction surveys showed that patients wanted the same experience no matter what location they went to for care. As these service conundrums continued to develop, PAMF’s leaders soon discovered that Lean Six Sigma tools could help them create a model of care that meets patient expectations and replicate it at their many locations. After benchmarking with ThedaCare and hiring leaders experienced in LSS, PAMF’s management team began to realign its primary care delivery system at 40 locations using lean principles. Borrowing from ThedaCare’s success, they started with the “model cell” concept to align everyone with the goal of improving the patient experience. What is a “model cell”? Let’s say you’re a large hospital system like PAMF. Is it realistic to find the training and financial resources to help the entire organization “go Lean” all at once? Probably not. But if you start with one department where the leaders are excited and eager to be the first, you can set a model for the rest of the system to learn from. The cell model becomes a demonstration project, a proof concept, that shows real change and real results. Otherwise, if you try to implement LSS across an organization without adequate training and support, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and accomplishing little. That is how LSS fails – by not showing results. PAMF found that the model cell was the best way to help staff learn about LSS principles. The leadership team used this approach to show the rest of the organization what “exceptional care” looks like. This generated excitement among staff, and best practices from the model cell began to spread organically. Ironically, one of PAMF’s initial successes had more to do with staff satisfaction than with bottom-line improvements. It turns out that juggling a million priorities was creating staff burnout. LSS helped alleviate the problem and get team members home for dinner with their families. They teamed up nurses and medical assistants to work more closely with physicians to quickly and efficiently identify patient concerns, communicate the concern with the physician and speed the process of actual patient care. This improved not only staff satisfaction, but patient satisfaction as well. If you haven’t read the case study, it’s definitely worth the read. Today, PAMF’s lean initiatives are focused on continuous improvement with a concentrated effort to bring daily engagement into the organization’s specialty care areas. Kudos to the PAMF team making LSS applicable in day-to-day work and improving care for its patients. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
Read MoreCommunicating Process Improvements
Have you ever noticed that sometimes those that are most involved in something are often the least informed? Here’s a case in point. I recently took a flight at a major U.S. airport. When we got to the airport, we checked the monitors and determined our gate. Not long after that, we just happened to check the monitor again. It showed that we were at a different gate. So, we dutifully gathered up our belongings and went to the new gate. Once there, we overheard staff talking about the need to perform maintenance on a plane and an expected 15 minute delay. After about 45 minutes, we noticed that the flight crew had mysteriously disappeared. We checked the monitor and our gate had changed again. We headed to our third gate at the other end of the terminal. While we were sitting at the gate, we overhead a gate agent ask another agent if she was going to be working the late night flight. Soon, we noticed that neither gate attendant was there. An overhead announcement notified us that our gate had been changed a fourth time. So, everyone in the gate area rushed to the new gate. Four gates, in two and half hours, and only one actual airport notification. Imagine how irritated I would have been if I had missed my flight because the airline made these changes, but forgot to tell the passengers. This often is the case in process improvement projects. The team develops a very good plan about what needs to be changed and how to implement those changes. They forget, however, to notify those individuals or groups that will be directly affected by these changes. It’s no wonder that many process improvement projects fail, because of lack of involvement or acceptance. Most people naturally do not like change, especially when it is change they are unaware of before it occurs. Just as we were moving multiple times within the airport, people can be seen moving in apparently random fashion trying to keep up with new processes. A good communication plan and involvement of key individuals is crucial to any successful PI project. The more people know, the more they want to help. The less they know, the more resistant they are. If you’re feeling resistance to your PI project, have you re-evaluated the way you are communicating the changes? A little communication goes a long way in obtaining buy in and support. How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive...
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