One of my clients, a wireless business-to-business (B2B) telecom company, was experiencing a significant problem in their call center. They were absolutely inundated with calls—most of them problems. They were spending a significant amount of money trying to manage the call center—adding new call center representatives, training new call center representatives, bringing in new call center supervisors, figuring out how to limit the duration of calls, developing escalation plans, etc.
The call center was deemed crucial because they were running about a 50-percent customer turnover annually, which they considered simply as a cost of doing business. Their unwritten strategy was to “outsell churn.” In addition, there was no real effort to retain customers—no provisions for doing so in the system. When customers were ready to leave the company, they simply told them how to do it, either by e-mail or fax… until someone in the organization got smart.
Instead of continuing to attack the symptom of the problem, the management of this telecom company decided to go after the root of the problem using Six Sigma. The call center executive adopted a Six Sigma marketing approach to the issue that began by identifying who the call center was trying to serve. They got rid of their nonfunctioning customer satisfaction system and brought in one that measured customer value based on its strong link to market share growth. Then, they captured how their customers defined value. One of the key critical-to-quality (CTQs) factors was called “customer focus.”
Below are 15 features of a Six Sigma call center marketing strategy that has a customer focus:
My client’s call center’s performance on these attributes was abysmal—they were the worst in the market. The call center’s competitors were beating them like a drum. The wireless company used this information to map out the order to delivery process to see where they might improve. While many of the problems showed up in the call center, they soon discovered that the seeds of these problems were sown earlier in the sales process.
Following is a quick rundown of what the call center discovered by using Six Sigma marketing in their improvement efforts:
• Call center salespeople were being paid a commission on the number of customers they signed up. In their rush to sign up customers they were failing to collect the proper information, making it impossible to process applications. Virtually every time an application was reviewed, it was sent back to the call center sales representative due to missing or inaccurate information. Because the call center salespeople were so focused on “head hunting” and had already received credit for the sale, applications were lost or stuck in what the company called “the trouble basket” for further processing. As a result, the call center received many calls from customers asking about the status of their system.
• Call center salespeople were failing to discuss the features of the system and explain how to use them. These are complex systems requiring a fair amount of explanation. Again, because of the head-hunting mindset to outsell churn, no time was invested to make sure customers could actually use the systems. This resulted in the call center being inundated with calls from frustrated customers claiming the product didn’t work as advertised. Call center personnel were forced to become trainers.
Their solution? First, the call center introduced an electronic order form that could not be submitted until all fields were properly filled out. This greatly expedited the handling of applications and significantly reduced the call center order-to-delivery time. Also. the number of calls regarding the status of orders was greatly reduced.
Second, salespeople were brought in and their job descriptions were changed to make sure that the call center’s training component was emphasized. This was tracked in the call center by linking customers to the right salespeople. Salespeople with large numbers of customers calling for training were flagged and interventions made. Again, the numbers of calls into the call center were reduced.
Finally, call center personnel were reduced in number and trained to retain customers. The result of this was that turnover dropped from 50 percent to 25 percent below the industry standard. However, this improvement was insufficient and the telecom company continued to work on the problem.
The moral of the story is important and teachable. Customer service is not solely the responsibility of the call center, but is the responsibility of everyone in the organization, especially those who are in touch with the customer. Problems that show up in one part of the system are often created elsewhere. This is an important function of the call center—track problems and use this information to conduct system reviews.
This article was first published on Customer Management IQ, a division of IQPC.
R. Eric Reidenbach, Ph.D., is the developer of Six Sigma marketing a disciplined and fact-based approach to growing market share in targeted product/markets by creating and delivering superior value. His book, Six Sigma Marketing: From Cutting Costs to Growing Market Share (ASQ Quality Press, 2009), has been described as the next generation of Six Sigma. His book Listening to the Voice of the Market: How to Increase Market Share and Satisfy Current Customers (Productivity Press, 2009) was released November 2009.
Reidenbach is currently the director of the Six Sigma Marketing Institute. Six Sigma Marketing is a fact-based disciplined approach to growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value. For a free pdf of his new book Best in Marketing: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing go to www.6sigmarketing.com and go to the contact page.
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