Methodologies such as Lean Sigma can bring significant cost savings while improving customer satisfaction.
In outsourcing, maintaining the status quo should never be good enough. “One of the responsibilities and duties of an outsourcing provider is to add value,” says Joe Doyle, EMEA marketing director of Sitel, the global business process outsourcing provider. “If you’re running a customer contact centre, for example, you should be constantly looking for ways to reduce costs for the client and/or improve the customer experience, not just answer the phone.”
To deliver such improvements, OSPs (Outsource Service Providers) are increasingly adopting the continuous improvement methodologies that have transformed the manufacturing industry over the last two decades, such as Lean Sigma. Sitel, for example, has nearly 100 Six Sigma practitioners on its payroll (representing an investment of a million euros on training courses alone), and Lean Sigma has become integral to Sitel’s operations.
The Lean Sigma approach – Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control – lends itself well to contact centres, says Doyle: “Contact centres tend to be transparent and process-driven, so it’s easy to measure improvements and demonstrate benefits.” Common symptoms of underperformance include over-long average handling times, low rates of first contact resolution, large numbers of abandoned calls, and poor net promoter scores (the likelihood of customers recommending a supplier to their friends).
The improvements can be startling, says Doyle. “Productivity is a major focus, and we’re able to improve the productivity index of all our employees. The aim is to incorporate a culture of efficiency into all processes of the business.” Even a modest 5 per cent reduction in average handling times can save the client a six-figure sum annually, and more significant gains are not uncommon: one global telecoms company saved £3.5m during the first year alone, says Doyle.
Customer satisfaction is the second key target for improvement – often hand in hand with productivity gains, since customers don’t want to hang on the phone or engage in email ping-pong any more than their suppliers do.
Often the solution is to make a series of incremental improvements that can add up to significant gains: stripping out irrelevant or inefficient elements, moving popular or more pertinent items higher up the agent’s call script, dealing with common faults through interactive voice response (IVR), better call analysis to ensure optimum staffing levels at different times. “You need greater flexibility to adjust to customer demands in real time,” says Doyle.
Sitel was able to cut the customer cancellation rate for another global telecoms company to below 7 per cent. “Their target was 10 per cent and they thought that was tough,” says Doyle. “It’s the lowest it has ever been and they still can’t believe we’ve done it.”
And a global consumer electronics firm achieved a double-digit improvement in its net promoter scores – enough, potentially, to double a company’s growth rate.
Although the Lean and Six Sigma expertise originates from the OSP, it soon rubs off on the client’s own people, who are closely involved at every stage. The combination of this skills transfer and the close analysis of business processes that characterises Lean Sigma can have significant ripple effects, says Doyle. “The process of gathering and analysing the data facilitates collaboration throughout the entire organisation. It creates debate about some of the time-honoured ways the organisation does things and opens up new thought processes.”
Lean and Six Sigma has been gaining ground among tier one OSPs over the last three or four years but it is still relatively leading-edge, says Doyle. “Lean Sigma is built into what Sitel does. But it’s by no means the norm in business process outsourcing across the board, and there’s still significant competitive advantage to be gained.”
by Paul Bray
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