Quick Glance Case Study: Email Customer Contact

“The lean review has allowed us to meet our desired SLA’s and improve customer satisfaction through better understanding of our demand and significantly reducing non-value add processing”

After completing a ChangeWise Lean Practitioner training course, one candidate submitted the following work-place project to gain their qualification to LCS Level 1c.

The Business Challenge

As part of our customer issue resolution process, we have a central mailbox for customer issues received via email. However, this mailbox was receiving high volumes of unnecessary queries from the Contact Team, resulting in extremely high contact effort for the Resolution Team.

This significantly impacted customer response times, which in turn affected customer satisfaction. Our delayed responses were also generating further failure demand, since customers were chasing issues multiple times, further compounding the volume/demand issues.

A Lean review was required to reduce the volume of queries sent to the central mailbox, increase customer satisfaction and reduce turnaround time.

Photo by Yannik Mika on Unsplash

Key people involved from client site

Specialists including the Contact Team, Resolution Team and Senior Leadership Team were involved in the Lean review.

Lean Methodology Employed

DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analise, Improve, Control)

Various Lean methodologies were used including, SIPOC, Current State Mapping, Demand Analysis, Waste Analysis, Value Analysis, Root Cause Analysis, Value and Non-Value Add Analysis

Current State Findings and Lean Activities

After completing the initial Demand Analysis, it was clear to see why the Current State process was unacceptable for customers:

• The team were receiving an average of 550 emails per month from various teams throughout the business.
• Operatives were working on emails up to 7 days old – the desired SLA aims to address or deal with queries within 48 hours.
• SLA’s were not achievable due to the amount of redirected query emails that shouldn’t be coming to the central maintenance mailbox.

We used a  SIPOC diagram, Current State Map and Waste Analysis to show the 12 key steps of the process and highlight unnecessary steps.

All steps were categorised into value adding, non-value adding or essential non-value adding. The percentage of value adding steps was 20%, compared to the non-value adding steps which were 60%. This clearly highlighted the high scale of waste within the process.

We adopted the Gemba process to directly understand the main issues faced by the Contact Team, this helped us to build a picture of why so many emails were sent to the central mailbox. We then used this data to complete a fish bone diagram and assess the issues against the process map.

Categorising the emails also meant we could identify reoccurring issues, allowing us to better understand what was needed in the future state process and remove failure demand.

Root cause of issues:

• Lack of ownership/governance
• Training issues/needs
• Focus on call handling time rather than first-time resolution

The Future State, Benefits & Outcomes

The Future State process was created by removing non-value add steps. We also used the categorisation information to create a simple user template for the Contact Team, this would ensure they understood where to direct issues in order to efficiently resolve customer queries and reduce unnecessary hand-offs. The new template will also form part of the training for new starters to ensure all employees follow the process. Additional benefits include:

• Improved communication between teams
• Reduced volume of emails to the central mailbox
• Increased stakeholder confidence
• Higher % of value-add steps
• Reduced time taken to resolve customer issues
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Improved ownership of process
• Increased team knowledge of end-to-end process

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

In Summary

The lean review has allowed us to meet our desired SLA’s and improve customer satisfaction through better understanding of our demand and significantly reducing non-value add processing. Since all areas of the business interact with the central mailbox, this lean review can be used as a footprint to further prevent other Customer Care teams from receiving failure demand.

Interested in looking at how Lean can help you to better understand and reduce failure demand? Contact us at info@changewise.co.uk and let’s talk about how we can help.

ChangeWise believes employee engagement is the foundation for successful Change. Training and coaching your people to use simple continuous improvement techniques will enable your organisation to continuously adapt and stay ahead in a constantly changing and challenging environment.

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