The problem
Where the time was going
A large financial services company ran a customer contact center that struggled to do the basics. Of the 400 to 500 calls coming in each day, only about 85 percent were answered, one in five callers got a resolution on the first call, and some questions took as long as 72 hours to settle, if they were settled at all. The average call ran 25 minutes.
The setup made it worse. There was no interactive voice response, only an answering machine, and incoming calls were switched across 42 lines purely on which of 105 representatives happened to be free. Representatives could not even see customer records, which turned out to be the heart of the problem.
What we modeled
Mapping the process, then testing the fix
Management first tried to map the call center with a static flow chart, but a fixed diagram could not show how the work actually behaved, so they set it aside and built a working model instead. The model captured the center as it was and then let the team test how it should be.
Running the as-is model exposed the root cause directly: with no access to customer records, representatives simply could not resolve calls. From there the team modeled the to-be process as a four-phase plan, sized around skills-based routing, an interactive voice response, and tiered representatives, and watched the redesign hold up even as many separate centers were consolidated into one.
Without using ProcessModel, this project would have been a very costly game of hit and miss, sort of a guessing game. It allows us to truly focus on the needs of the customer from a process approach, and not just on the technology. Technology is only an enabler.
The result
The proof, and the payoff
With the weak points fixed, the consolidated center now takes about 4,000 calls a day and answers 96 percent of them, even though call volume rose roughly tenfold through consolidation. The abandoned-call rate fell from 15 percent to 4 percent, first-and-done resolutions climbed to 80 percent, and average handling time dropped from 25 minutes to 3.
An interactive voice response now guides callers through scripted options, skills-based routing manages 120 lines, and the representatives sit in three tiers, 300 in the first, 70 in the second, and 35 specialists in the third. The first three phases earned high marks on customer satisfaction surveys.
- 96%
- of calls answered, up from 85 percent
- 80%
- resolved first and done, up from 20 percent
- 3 min
- to handle a call, down from 25 minutes
Part of our work in services.