When you absolutely need to reduce the cycle time in your customer care organization and throwing bodies at the challenge just isn't an option.
Client Goal
To radically reduce the average cycle time diagnosing and re-dispatching on customer troubles that failed the first attempt at repair, so that many more customer troubles could be resolved in the 24 hour commitment window.
Business Challenge:
When the first attempt to restore customer service fails, there is often one last chance to fix the problems before a 24 hour out-of- service clock counts down to zero, and service penalties accrue. A group of Tier 2 telephony and video service experts look to beat the clock reviewing original customer complaints, what was learned from a failed repair attempt, so that they can re-diagnose and escalate the fix to an employee with the right knowledge and with fingers closest to where the repair needs to happen before the clock reaches zero.
Historically tickets arrived with less than 6 hours to time zero. With an average cycle time of 10 hours, the clock would run out while in the hands of this team or with the employee the repair was escalated to, and the result was the clock reaching zero 70% of the time ... BOOM!
In an earlier attempt to do better, many people were added to the group, but throwing bodies on the problem did not help.
Solution
Decision Coordinator was used to automate picking up tickets from the customer care mainframes, researching past fix attempts and providing employees a new tool for decision support.
Decision Coordinator fostered a tempo of making excellent decisions fast and using new automation to execute on those decisions while employees moved onto the next repair ticket. If a customer needed to be contacted and was not available at the time, Decision Coordinator would manage a queue of customers to contact again and/or wait on a call back.
Before Decision Coordinator, the customer had many excellent automation functions, a voice response unit, and a workflow and expert tool overlaying the customer care system that was successful for Tier-1 employees. Decision Coordinator worked in concert with these solutions, including a BPM orchestration engine, so that advanced functions could happen between groups, such as updating in real-time which Tier-2 employee had work on their desktop so that a chance call from an incoming customer could be directed to them, or if not yet on a user desktop, a Tier-1 employee could take over and assist the customer live.
Results
- ServiceSPAN provided a complete decision support tool that was quickly configured to work with the clients existing applications within 12 weeks.
- Employees can now perform work at a much faster tempo, with sub-tasks automated so they can spend more time making excellent decisions and less time swivel-chairing between many different screens in legacy repair application.
- Reduced the need for skill specialization among employees.
- Slashed cycle time, from when a ticket arrives to when it is re-dispatched, by a factor of 10, down to 1 hour.
- Reduced total employees needed to achieve goals from 18 full-time equivalent employees per shift to just 2 per shift.
