The challenge
Based on customer and employee feedback the team knew they had an opportunity to improve first contact resolution and hand-offs between teams.
What they did
They assembled a cross functional team and rallied around their purpose to get everyone aligned and focused on the task, which was to identify the key processes that where causing customers to call back unnecessarily (we call this Failure Demand) and that led to hand-offs between teams.
The workshop highlighted a number of processes which were then prioritised so they knew where to start, they set up a visualisation of the work by capturing the opportunity and then worked in 2-week sprints to break own the specific outcomes required in order to deliver each initiative.
Using Planner in MS Teams to visualise the work. The ‘board’ is the focal point for the team to keep the work moving, this fosters open communication around blockers and helps them work as one team to get things done.
Critical in any continuous improvement initiative is to gather data to define and measure your benefits so the team set off to gather data both the hard financial numbers and their less tangible but equally important metrics around staff and customer sentiment.
They identified the key customer processes that drove the most pain points and ran further workshops with stakeholders to get to the root cause of the issues, mapped new processes and engaged cross functional support in order to make sure everyone across Bega was focused on improving the customer experience.
This is an overview of a key process that has been reengineered with the support of a cross functional team. They identified pain points, new process steps, enhancements to customer communication, new operating rhythms and opportunities for automation.
A great way to do this was by inviting these stakeholders to the stand-ups so they could see the work being completed by the stakeholders could then see where they needed to get involved.
What they achieved
At the time of writing this blog the team had identified over $800k in financial benefits. In addition, there CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and employee engagement benefits that will be realised as a result of improve processes and removing waste.
There have developed a stable, reliable and repeatable process that will help them deliver while adjusting to the inevitable curve balls day to day running of a contact centre will throw at them.
They also took a step forward in improving cross functional engagement to support customers, elevating the voice of the customer. The contact centre team have also improved their capability to collaborate and drive outcomes important to their customers.
Takeaways
They put their faith in a process that supported them to change the way they worked but that alone wasn’t enough, it lead them to change the way they work together and this led to changes in how they think about the work. This is the heart of cultural change, new norms and practices are being established and a culture of continuous improvement is the result.
Leaders play such a critical role in any transformation, knowing when to step in and step back and relentlessly staying the course to support their team and the process. At Bega this was definitely the case and this couldn’t have happened without the right mindset from the Leader.