BPO
The Business Problem A leading
services organization was receiving complaints from its customers
through their quarterly Customer Satisfaction Survey about too
much time on the phone to get the queries resolved. After receiving
this response on the survey for two quarters, the VP Customer
Service decided to take action. Since the Contact Center for
their organization was outsourced to a different company, he
contacted the Operations Head of the Contact Center and communicated
his concern.
The
Contact Center Operations Head had a close retired friend who
was an expert practitioner of Six Sigma. He promised to help
him to address the problem using his Six Sigma knowledge.
The Benefit Analysis The Expert
first decided to do a benefit analysis and worked on the call
data on various days on different types of calls. He found that
the Average Handle Time (AHT) was 223 seconds per call as compared
to 180 stipulated in the contract. This loss of 43 seconds resulted
in the loss of close to 24,000 calls a day which amounted to
a revenue loss of $27,000 per day.
Problem Identification Having shown the financial magnitude
of the problem, the expert started his analysis. He segmented
the data as per the types of calls and wanted to know if a
certain call type was causing the problem. His segmentation
proved fruitful as the time spent on technical calls was the
highest and also the frequency of such calls was also very
high.
Root Cause Analysis Further analysis and talking to the
various agents revealed that the reason the technical calls
took so much time was that most of the time the agent has
to escalate the call because of lack of knowledge on the subject
or spent a lot of time looking at the help content provided.
Solution The Expert then sat with the content
experts to revamp the help content to include better help
on the technical issues & also ease of finding it. He
also developed a training session along with the training
department to take the agents through the various technical
issues and ensured it was introduced as a part of the New
Employee training. To ensure this problem does not occur,
he mistake proofed the solution by creating a process wherein
new technical issues get captured, reviewed by the content
experts and then found their way to the Online help, agent
training and also New Employee training.
Result The results showed
in the next two weeks as the AHT came down to 170 - 175 range,
below the customer stipulated time. This improvement also trickled
in the next Customer Survey of the Services organization as
scores went up and the complained regarding time disappeared.
