Wisdom from the Front Line Tapping the Power of Your People
1 Sep, 2004
By: Pete Lytle,Renée KuwaharaWhat if you could shave hundreds of thousands of dollars of contact center operational costs and drive an equal amount of incremental revenues while improving customer satisfaction—all without having to make a massive financial investment? No need to do a major overhaul of your IVR system. No need to embark on a huge enterprise data warehouse project taking years to fully implement. This may be hard to believe, but it can be done.
It is accomplished by having leaders set the tone and direction, giving people the skills and tools to make improvements in what they do every day, engaging everyone down to the front line, and making successes visible and tangible to the rest of the company. In other words: creating an environment that encourages total participation and continuous improvement.
To become a valuable part of an organization’s culture, continuous improvement must leverage established improvement methodologies and become the way the organization does business. Your approach should incorporate relevant components of any quality management principles, drawing upon the long history of lessons learned (especially those from the front line), and best practices. It should be tailored to the unique challenges of the contact center environment, be simple enough to be broadly adopted, but have some rigor to make it work. Our experience shows that a simple two-step approach can be very effective:
1. Establish a vision, leadership support and financial relevance.
2. Support and encourage total participation; establish continuous improvement as part of everyone’s job.
And of course, since the contact center business is a people business, you must fully leverage the talents of all employees, especially the agents.
Vision, Leadership and Relevance
One of the first steps in making continuous improvement part of the company’s culture is for your leadership team to establish a clear vision. “To establish a high performance culture focused on continuously improving the value we provide to our clients and their customers, shareholders and employees” is a good example of a possible vision statement. To realize this vision, continuous improvement must be linked to important business initiatives in a highly visible way. In fact, it would be beneficial for a company, as part of its annual business planning process, to identify 8-12 company-wide, large improvement efforts that become part of the overall financial plan.
Treating important business initiatives as continuous improvement initiatives has two important benefits. First, it applies continuous improvement best practices to help accomplish the objective, and second, it allows the leadership team to “walk the talk,” demonstrating their support for continuous improvement through their actions.
Empowerment
With a strong leadership focus on continuous improvement, you can turn more attention to getting all employees involved in improving the business, as well as embrace the principle that making improvements is part of everyone’s job. To support total participation, empower and equip employees with a standard improvement methodology, tools, and training to drive their own improvements. These resources should be applied with a level of rigor that is appropriate to the complexity of the problem. Just as you would not use a sledgehammer to swat a fly, use tools appropriate to the task.
Ideally the tools you select should be easy to understand and able to be applied with different levels of rigor. Here is an example of a simplified improvement process.
1. Define the problem or improvement opportunity. Use metrics to clearly, concisely, and quantitatively identify the gaps between objectives and actual performance.
2. Describe the current situation. Build a fact base. Support the problem statement by gathering both quantitative and qualitative information, and define measurements and criteria for success.
3. Analyze the causes of the problem. Ask “why” five times. When problems arise, work to find their root cause, not just the symptoms.
4. Develop a solution. Based on the quantitative and qualitative data, create alternative solutions that address the root of the problem. Weigh the pros and cons of each alternative to determine the best choice.
5. Implement the solution and evaluate results. Determine if the solution results meet the expectations for improvement. Review metrics for quantitative evidence, and survey employees for qualitative input.
6. Sustain the results. Hold the gains. Ensure training for agents is updated and modified as appropriate, and make the necessary adjustments to policies and procedures.
7. Communicate the results. Celebrate success through recognition and rewards that go above and beyond the usual employee performance evaluations.
Improvement tools are approaches, tips and techniques such as process maps, Pareto charts, fishbone diagrams, and trend charts, documented in a simple, consistent, easy-to-use format that help define and quantify any problem, identify its origin and guide users toward a solution. These tools are consistent with tools you would find supporting Six Sigma’s DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) or any other standard improvement approach.
With the right leadership and tools, agent teams can make great progress. For example, take the cable/broadband company whose customer care costs were skyrocketing due to increasing call volumes. An agent team conducted a root cause analysis and identified that a significant number of inbound calls were generated due to inaccurate billing information from the client. The team developed a solution specifically aimed at minimizing the billing calls, but essentially transformed the customer care process to the effective use of self-service technologies. The result? A reduction of customer service costs by $15 million annually.
Total Participation
Involving all employees is essential, and to adequately equip them, you must make resources easily accessible to accelerate improvement efforts.
A Web-based employee Intranet portal, accessible by all employees, can provide the infrastructure and serve as the hub for all contact center process improvement and knowledge management activities. Such a portal can be accessible to agents at their desktops or from kiosks placed in designated areas, and its access can be controlled through role-based passwords and permissions, encouraging agent participation while guarding against misuse.
An Intranet portal captures the results of your improvement process and should be flexible and powerful enough to host a broad range of capabilities, allowing staff to:
• Submit, manage, and track the implementation of specific improvement efforts
• Access tools and templates that support proper execution and completion of the improvement process
• Review improvement efforts and success stories from across the organization
• Access a best practices knowledge base that encourages and facilitates sharing of information to improve the value of services delivered to customers
• Partake in formal and self-paced training on new tools and techniques, or on the improvement process itself
• Receive recognition for a job well done, stimulating and reinforcing interest and involvement
The Results
A strong continuous improvement culture enabled by an Intranet portal really works. Experience shows that together they deliver better operational performance, higher customer satisfaction ratings and improved agent moral. Using this model, we’ve seen evidence of results such as:
• Call transfer rates were slashed 25 percent while exceeding average handle time targets for a financial services company
• A cable/broadband provider increased revenue by $4 million annually by applying continuous improvement to re-engineer its credit adjustment process and train agents in its use
• Customer satisfaction for another financial services company improved by 46 percent following implementation of the improvement process
• A wireless company saved $1.4 million in annualized cost by implementing new processes that enabled agents to simultaneously perform previously discrete functions
In each of these examples, a team consisting of contact center employees identified the improvement opportunity, developed an idea to improve the process and successfully implemented the improvement. Pairing process and technology to create a culture that makes continuous improvement part of everyone’s job ensures a high performance contact center with active employee involvement. Everyone wins—management, agents and customers.
Sidebar: Lessons Learned
A continuous improvement culture enabled by Intranet portal technology encourages employee involvement and delivers positive operational results in the contact center. Here are some of the key success factors:
• Focus on financials. Projects grounded in the reality of contact center financials (on both the cost and benefit sides) inspire the most change and have staying power.
• Make the improvement process as relevant to the contact center environment as possible. Be practical.
• Remember that execution of the improvement process is just as important as its definition. Keep things simple, and provide relevant examples and practical application of tools and techniques.
• Build a culture of improvement that makes sense in your environment.
• Empower employees to contribute through a combination of leadership, process, training and technology.
• Be creative when including employees in the improvement process to maximize their involvement and minimize their time away from the front line. Use a combination of venues such as surveys, focus groups, short brainstorming sessions and pre-shift meetings.
• Communicate success stories and utilize recognition and rewards to energize employees and stimulate involvement.
• Incorporate continuous improvement into the performance evaluations of all contact center employees—including agents.
Bottom line: You can drive significant financial and operational improvement with a relatively small investment and a strong commitment to a continuous improvement culture.
