Case Study: Customer Service Centre

The Case Study

The director of the Customer Services Division of a bank asked for help. In the invoicing department of his middle office he is facing several problems which he would like to get solved. The invoicing manager of the area doesn’t see any fault in himself. Everything is always fine when asked about problems or how the area is performing; in fact, his standard message is: “We always manage our workload”. Upper Management heard that customer satisfaction went down quite a lot recently and would want to get a grip of it.

Invoices are produced monthly, always towards the end of the month. The manager says this is important so they can all focus, even though some invoices don’t need to be dealt with that way. Staff is highly specialised in their work streams of producing invoices. Their responsibilities reach from creating LANFs, printing and sending of invoices, customer services in regards to invoicing, dunning.

The team is scattered across various locations, which is the reason why the manager installed a monthly meeting. The meeting is scheduled for 2 hours and every participant reports what he or she did and what the issues were. The team consists of 15 people.

The director is only on site once a month for 2 or 3 days. He has heard that there seems to be a problem with invoices, but he can’t prove anything. The site director is there daily, but doesn’t have a lot of time for the invoicing manager. He thinks the latter is long enough in the company to be able to manage the workload without big interrogation.

When asking the employees, their main problem seems to be the impossibility to go on holidays as there is no one around to cover for them. Their sickness rate seems higher than usual, also staff turnover. Employees range across all ages and seniority. Their interfaces are usually customers, the operations team for whose services they produce the invoices, the sales department, IT, and other specialist areas.

When looking at their Explorer environment, it seems a total mess. Procedures are everywhere and nowhere, and various versions float around erratically, if there are procedures at all.  

The director wants you to make his life easier and come up with a Six Sigma project.


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The DMAIC Cycle

Six Sigma Projects follow this cycle. The letters mean and show phases of the project: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve/Implement, Control/Follow-up. Personally, I don't like the terms Improve and Control, so I came up with my own. I have run a similar project and changed the case study to a degree to keep matters confidential.


Define

In the definition phase I'd look what the key themes are, the headlines of work streams that would go on a project plan. In that phase the project structure would also be decided upon - project manager, team members, steering committee, meetings, risk analysis, ...; a project charter would be written. 

The themes from this case study are pretty classical. The major one is Operations Excellence and particular work areas seem to be invoice cycles and planning, flexibility of staff, processes and interfaces, meeting structures, KPIs. Other themes are management coaching, the organisation (locations and team structures), and Customer Service Satisfaction. All in all, it is mainly an Operations Excellence project.  


Measure

2 things need to be measured - project success and operational performance. They don't necessarily mutually exclude one another, but in theory it can be said that the latter measurements are for and will continue after the project. 

What would be interesting to know and have measures about may be the following:
- Amount of invoices per invoice cycle
- How many kind of different invoice types there are (and whether they are comparable in terms of effort to produce)
- Customer service satisfaction data and how it is compiled
- Worked hours of the invoicing team, with over-time.
- Outstanding dunning items (receivables)
- Customer queries: the amount per day, worked hours, also query types
- Staff sickness rates
- Error rates of invoices (pre- and post-sending to customers)
- current KPIs to see what is already regularly measured
- etc.


Analyse

In the analysis phase it would be good to get some thorough data analysis from the measurement phase (above). It helps to understand the nature of the business and also hopefully shows patterns of seasonality, peaks and troughs, etc. 

Further or analysis would be:
- Processes. It would be good to understand the invoicing process(-es), how those LANFs are created, till they are sent to the customer. This includes interfaces to other departments. 
- Management training records. It is important to see what the managers and directors already know and whether they apply their knowledge. There might be a confidentiality problem with HR, but management can be asked directly what kind of training they have received.
- Staff training records. There seem to be flexibility problems with staff filling in for one another.
- Meetings. Joining operational meetings and see how they are conducted and whether they are any effective and efficient.
- Customer Satisfaction. Root cause analysis on customer queries. Maybe customer interviews.
- Organisational effectiveness. Analyse locations and communication between teams of the current organisation
- Work procedures. How are they written, if at all. 
- IT infrastructure. What IT systems and how well they are installed. 


Improve/Implement

It is difficult to predict what exactly will be implemented. But the following can be said:

- Balanced Scorecard to include measurements of customer service, staff flexibility and satisfaction, financials and processes. This is especially interesting because the department seems to have problems in the first 2 areas. The other 2 are pretty standard.
- Flexibility Matrix of staff. Cross-training of staff and making the more flexible to cover themselves. 
- Standardised and efficient invoicing processes, including all interfaces. Also dunning processes. This has the potential for big change requests in the IT infrastructure, which needs extra time to implement usually. 
- Writing procedures for those processes that can be used as training manuals for new or existing staff.
- Management coaching.
- Create smaller teams, maybe manage to move teams together into one location.
- Implement efficient and effective daily or weekly planning and review meetings with action plan and KPIs.


Control/Follow-up

The follow-up phase is very essential, as in this one all implemented improvements will be fine-tuned and more important, behaviours aligned. This phase is one of intensive coaching. It must be ensured that staff and management are not falling back into old behaviours. Audits will be undertaken, not only by consultants but also by staff and management; these are so-called compliance tours. 

Triggering Epiphanies

Have you ever had those moments when you suddenly and completely out of the blue decided something which has had a long-lasting impact, which has changed your life? Those are "epiphany moments". One has to cherish them, as they don't come often in life, but once they are there, we need to grasp them and just go for whatever there is to do! Epiphanies should always result in actions. That's why coaches and consultants like me like them so much. 

There is always a way out!

I have had a few in my life, they tend to appear very sporadically, unexpectedly, some are stronger, some are weaker, and of course, the stronger the better. They can reach levels of excitement to an orgasmic scale.

I had one recently:

It happened on 30 June 2015: I got up, had a coffee, decided to go to the local gym and sign up for membership, went to my wardrobe, packed a bag, went down the hill to the new local health and leisure centre, signed up without having seen what the place looks like, and started to exercise. I did it as if I had been remote controlled. I walked down the hill like a zombie that has smelled fresh human flesh.

Me on day 1! 

I am still amazed about it, as for the last 15 years I avoided the gym and any kind of physical exhaustion like the plague. Suddenly this! Now, 4 weeks after, I am quite happy about it and I like going there. I don't overdo it, I don't think I ever will; looking like Arnold has never been on my to do list, but a little bit of exercise is actually quite nice. 

Some of those epiphanies can be triggered, some probably come completely out of the blue. It must be similar to dreams; many stem from activities and occurrences that took place in our active lives, others come from deep within our subconsciousness. 

Epiphany moments in a business context are rare. I can imagine entrepreneurs probably have them when coming up with an idea and then take action. The role of a coach is to pave the way for them to happen. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's like with dreams, you can't force anyone to dream something specific. 

Epiphany in Bulgaria, where on 6 January every year men throw themselves into ice-cold water to fetch a cross that has been thrown in by the local priest. My coaching method isn't that drastic...  ;-) 

I have an example where I managed to trigger such an epiphany moment: 

Imagine a factory, break time for the workers is at 11:00 and there is no canteen on site, just a vending machine with sandwiches, chocolates, and the like; and then there is this little van from a local bakery that drives from factory to factory selling warm food, no meals, just warm sandwiches and rolls. For our German speakers, they sold Leberkässemmeln, but I am refraining from explaining this in English. 

Anyway, whenever I walked around the shop floor I heard a siren at 10:15 and most workers left their work place and went to that van to buy their "Leberkässemmeln". Those were kept in aluminium foil to keep them warm in order to bridge over till 11:00. What happened though, in most cases, break started at 10:15 because people wanted to eat their rolls straight away. Production figures plummeted daily during that hour. 

I went to the plant manager and just enquired about that sandwich van and he proudly told me about managing to finally have the van stop at 3 different locations inside the factory so that his workers would not have to leave their work place too early in order to walk all the way to the main gate where the van used to stop in order to be able to buy their "well deserved rolls". 

One morning after sitting over the project goals, which was to raise output by a certain percentage and we were far from the target line, I said to him a little bit after 10:00, "I need a break, why don't we take a stroll to the coffee machine in the factory and I get us a coffee...?". We went and of course at 10:20 the factory was empty, as everyone was queuing up at the van outside. I said, "It must be break time, nobody is here anymore, the machines are all switched off..."

The sandwich van does not exist anymore and break time starts at 11:00 again. We discussed this issue with the workers' council and came up with a good solution. The plant manager told me after a while: "Roland, I was so embarrassed when you showed me what happened down there without rubbing it in. It was the moment when I knew we really needed to sort the business out and start pushing mountains". 

We did and managed the turnaround and hit the target line. Happy Epiphany! 

That's an epiphany gone wrong!

Technocratic Thinking about Behaviour Change

It seems that my behaviour change entry sparked off the most interest from what I can see in the Google statistics about my blog. Reason enough to elaborate a little bit about the fact that behaviour change is not some mufty-flufty stuff, but has to be taken seriously when being in the process of change. 


Whenever I want to write down an actual process in a company which is ISO certified I get the remark "Hold on, I will bring the ISO files". I would then reply, "There is no need for that, as I want the real process, not the written down one" and with that remark I usually bump into a brick wall, which in return, I will bring to fall most of the time. 


There is this perception out there, especially amongst people who believe in structure, process, order and organisation (let me call them technocrats) that once a process is written down and communicated it is also lived and effective! I am afraid to say, but this is the biggest reason for downfall after major change projects. 


In the very most cases I can prove that real processes are almost always different from ISO ones, especially when processes and steps in those processes are depending on people rather than machines. This means, a process "manufacturing steps of a metal tool" is more likely to be ISO-true than a process "the daily planning and review meeting". The first is a mechanical process with lots of machine and computer based activities, the latter is solely depending on people's behaviours. 


So, why do particularly people based processes vary so greatly from the agreed ones which one can find in ISO books and any other official process documents? The reason is that behaviour change did not take place! 


Let's refer back to the "daily planning and review meeting"; I am sure, when it was installed, an agenda has been designed, a room planned, the participants chosen, and the chairperson has also agreed on running the show. "Fine", we think (we as in technocrats or junior consultants like me back in the 90s then), "they all agreed, we explained the layout of the meeting, it should run smoothly. And in the end, it is a very simple tool in the management system anyway; it's only a meeting". 


But what one forgets when doing so is:
- Have the chairperson and participants bought into the meeting?
- Did we train the chairperson in running an effective and efficient review meeting? 
- Have we ensured the agenda is widely understood?
- Is the chairperson able to confront all participants in case they miss deadlines?
- Has the meeting time and location been agreed and communicated?
- etc, etc, etc....


Whenever a new process is installed, it needs following up! This is mostly forgotten. Whenever people are involved, one needs to ask oneself whether they have received sufficient training and coaching in performing these tasks, even if those are only basic ones. Regular follow-up after sufficient training is also important. Think about the 3 phases of learning (please look it up again on my previous blog about behaviour change), mechanical compliance is by far a stage in the process of change a company wants to find itself in. 


And now sit back, take out your ISO book and review its contents! Have fun!