The problem
Where the time was going
A consulting firm was growing faster than almost any competitor of its size, with one business unit up 57 percent in a single fiscal year. Fast growth is good news, but it put real pressure on the practice assistance group that supported more than 6,000 professionals across the United States.
The group was at a turning point, shifting from a traditional help desk to a full support center, and it had to get the design right. Hours of operation, employee profiles, the changing mix of requests, and the mix of channels they arrived through, by phone, email, fax, walk-in, and intranet, would all make or break the new operation.
What we modeled
Mapping the process, then testing the fix
To understand how those factors would interact, the team built a working model of the support center. It was aimed at four goals: control cost per request, optimize the use of people, meet service-level agreements, and understand the staffing dynamics under growth.
Following a six-step method, similar processes were grouped, flow-charted, and linked into a validated as-is model. Because that model matched real data, the proposed web-centric design was readily accepted, and the team could sweep the share of requests arriving by web against those by phone to see what changed.
The result
The proof, and the payoff
The web channel turned out to be the single biggest lever. When most requests came in through the website, utilization ran about 37 percent lower and cost per request about 34 percent lower than in the phone-heavy scenarios, while throughput and service-level achievement were higher.
The model pointed to a support center positioned as web-first wherever possible, with a near-term staffing level of around a dozen representatives and a gradual shift toward more senior, versatile staff as self-service grew. With that direction, the group kept pace with the growth and stayed on track.
- 57%
- unit growth absorbed
- ~34%
- lower cost per request via the web channel
- ~37%
- lower utilization via the web channel
Part of our work in services.