Imagine a world where you could take the Lean Tools and simplify them for the common man. So many Lean Practioners are quick to tell you how many years they have studied Lean and how important it is to only utilize experienced consultants.  But what if you don’t work for a company that is rolling out an Enterprise Wide Lean Deployment? What if your business doesn’t have a culture or philosophy of improvement? Can you still implement the principles of Lean?
The answer is YES YES and YES if you FOCUS.  This article will demonstrate how to experience pockets of excellence using the FOCUS methodology for Lean. A method aimed at simplifying lean and making it palatable to the new practioner.

None of us operate in a perfect environment. As we have seen from the latest crisis, even Toyota makes mistakes. It doesn’t mean that as an individual or an organisation you should miss out on the power of utilizing lean to streamline your business processes.

Read more: Demystifying Lean with FOCUS

All too often companies continue to use their inbound customer service call centre as the ‘garbage processing’ function of the organization.  Then when the noise about poor service gets too loud and the costs of handling all this garbage gets too high, the trend is to outsource the call centre to a cheaper operator, which is often an off-shore location in a developing country.

Today, outsourcing call centres is the biggest trend since the rush to implement ERP systems of the late 1990’s.  A perceived benefit of the outsourced arrangement is that the company is able to prescribe service delivery through performance metrics as defined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA).  This is supposed to ensure that customer service levels and customer problems are suitably addressed.  Due to the visibility of call answering times and call resolution, Speed of Answer (SoA) and First Time Fix (FTF) are often the favorite metrics defined in the SLA.  The interpretation is that the Call Centre that can resolve customer queries quickly and preferably in the fist contact with the customer can take more new calls.  The irony is that these metrics are often mutually exclusive.  However, the call centre management team and Customer Service Agent (CSA) are bound by the SLA to chase these elusive targets.

At the same time companies are rushing to physically remove the call centres from core business, there is considerable effort being made to remotely reconnect the call centre through the use of technology.  The objective is to use technology to empower the CSA’s to fix customer problems in their first contact, FTX. A wide selection of Information Technology (IT) and Telephonic applications have been designed (and sometimes over-engineered) to specifically address these challenges.  So with all the SLA’s and technology in place, why is first time fix so elusive?  Why are customers continuing to complain about their service experience?

Read more: Solving Core Business Problems by listening to Call Centres and Leveraging Lean Six Sigma