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 need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive workplace.
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