Enhancing Customer Service with Six Sigma
1 Nov, 2007
By: Oscar AlbanThis is unfortunate news for organizations trying to attract new business, satisfy existing customers, grow market share and increase bottom-line revenues. To achieve their objectives, maintain focus and better execute against enterprise objectives, Six Sigma is an attractive principle.
Aligning Six Sigma with Customer Sales/Service
Six Sigma is a business philosophy comprised of a group of methodologies that enable the highest echelon of quality and continuous improvement to achieve the greatest levels of customer satisfaction. An organization’s strategic goals and values are therefore aligned to its customers’ needs and expectations through the use of these metrics. As such, the contact center is a key part of this initiative, particularly in capturing the Voice of the Customer.
Sigma is a statistical term that measures how far a given product or process deviates from perfection. Many companies operate under a Three Sigma or Four Sigma model. This means that if a company is operating at Four Sigma, it has 6,200 bad customer experiences per million. At Three Sigma, it delivers 67,000 bad customer experiences per million. Those operating at Three or Four Sigma could therefore be spending a significant percent of their revenues fixing defects – a Six Sigma term known as the Cost of Poor Quality.
The main benefits of Six Sigma include the ability to:
• Decrease operating costs by 50 percent or more through a self-funded approach to improvement
• Reduce the waste chain
• Attain a better understanding of customer requirements
• Improve delivery and quality performance
• Acquire the critical process inputs necessary to respond to changing customer needs
• Drive improvements rapidly through internal resources.
Studies have shown that service now makes up more than 80 percent of the gross domestic product in the U.S. – a figure that is rapidly growing. Even within the manufacturing sector, organizations are realizing that only 20 percent of their product pricing is driven by manufacturing. The other 80 percent is directly related to costs associated with support and design functions. This could include finance, product development, purchasing and customer service. With Six Sigma, organizations can drastically improve that percentage variable, and thereby increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Since a foundation of Six Sigma is based on Voice of the Customer, one of the most logical places to gather such information is in the contact center. Take a medium-sized contact center with 200 agents, for example. If each agent handles 80 inbound calls per day, on average, the agent population has 16,000 opportunities to capture the Voice of the Customer in one day alone. In a single year, that equates to approximately 5.4 million customer interactions – most of which are likely to contain valuable customer intelligence and feedback.
Drilling Down to the “Root Cause”
The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if a company can measure how many “defects” it has in a process, then it can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to zero defects as possible. The most important monitoring category in support of Six Sigma is “root cause analysis.” It strives to show companies exactly where those performance-improvement opportunities lie and provide the actionable intelligence to fix them. Two ways to accomplish this are through customer feedback and advanced analytics.
Customer Feedback
First, simply ask customers what they think. This can be accomplished through real-time customer feedback, which goes beyond simple surveying. By asking customers at the end of every interaction to provide feedback on their experiences, organizations can gather an abundance of critical information that can be leveraged to improve operations and service levels. It’s amazing what customers will freely share about competitive offerings and the market in general, not to mention what they like and don’t like about doing business with a company.
Historically, customers have been willing to engage in providing feedback as part of their transactions 70 to 90 percent of the time. Customers should have the flexibility to provide feedback around the three key areas that have the most influence on their behavior: people, products/services and processes. From these interactions, an organization can then:
• Make informed business decisions by capturing and analyzing customer feedback – and the context in which it was provided – in real-time
• Gain increased visibility into customer service processes and performance based on the specific people, products and processes that impact the customer experience
• Measure business and revenue drivers in detail – including customer loyalty – through net promoter scores and other metrics
• Improve first-call resolution rates, decrease escalations, and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Move beyond sampling to capture statistically valid, census-level data – even with large numbers of customers and multiple sites – across all contact channels, including IVR, Web and e-mail
• Reference recorded calls from customer feedback and optionally integrate survey results with other workforce optimization metrics
• Benefit from a reliable, scalable system that works independently or integrates with existing back-office, contact center and CRM systems.
Contact center agents can be strong supporters in the customer feedback process. They can be trained to ask certain questions as part of their interactions with customers that will provide sought-after insight and perspective. This can be extremely useful to a Six Sigma team that’s charged with process-enhancing projects and determining what projects require focus next. Once a project is complete, the Voice of the Customer is essential to the team to determine whether or not objectives have been met.
Advanced Speech Analytics
A second way to identify root-cause issues is by leveraging intelligent monitoring. Most contact centers record either all of their calls or a percentage of them for sampling purposes. Advanced speech analytics technology can scan hundreds or thousands of calls, which may have been recorded and stored, for key trends. These calls can be separated from the masses for evaluation to provide insight into the triggers, or root causes, resulting in increased call volumes into an organization.
By drilling down to the corresponding calls, the catalysts can be determined. Today’s most robust and effective speech analytic solutions can deliver even greater value – by not just providing insight into what is happening, but why it’s happening. This is actionable information that organizations can immediately put to use and perspective that can provide greater understanding into the factors that shape business results.
Take a large telecommunications company as an example. It noticed a trend in one of its contact centers that supported Asian-speaking customers. During each billing cycle, call volumes spiked drastically. By listening to a sampling of customer interactions during that period, the organization quickly identified one major similarity. The callers were children, all contacting the company on behalf of their non-English speaking parents to ask questions and translate the bills prior to submitting payments. Armed with this information, the company created in-language billing in 12 different Asian dialects. As a result, call volume levels decreased dramatically, supervisors and trainers were able to focus on their real jobs and the company was able to gain wallet-share.
Capitalizing on Collaboration
Since Voice of the Customer is vital in determining what the critical issues are from the customers’ point of view, it’s important to understand that there are two sets of customers: external and internal. That’s why collaboration between the contact center, the Six Sigma project team and other departments is so vital. Once external input is gathered, with root causes identified and analytical insight available, the contact center can adjust – but just as critically, so can the back-office operations groups that also have a direct impact on customer service experiences and outcomes, such as those in product development, marketing, sales, finance and IT. This helps Six Sigma teams measure results and impact, which can be quantified – both in the customer-facing contact center and across an organization’s internal customer service value chain.
Six Sigma is becoming the way of doing business in many companies around the world and is increasing in popularity as a way to drive service quality. It can yield impactful results across industries that abide by it to run their businesses. And when implemented by professionals who understand the underlying principles, it can truly evolve corporate cultures –impacting everything from operations and staff satisfaction, to the customer experience and bottom line.
