Sometime in the third week of October last year, I was crossing the operations floor on my way to the desk. All I could hear was the cluttering of keyboards and occasionally, voice of a team leader interacting with an agent— usual environment in Chat customer care.
Half way through, I was called by Vaibhav (my manager) for a meeting. The team was waiting for me in a conference room. Vaibhav said, "I have an important update. One of our competitors has lost business to a new vendor in Chat".
We were not surprised as this was usual due to increased competition. Vaibhav continued, "Our client's business is growing and they are thinking about expanding Chat customer service. This is a good opportunity to get additional business, but how do we differentiate eClerx from competitors?"
The meeting concluded with an open-ended statement.
Next day, in the senior managers’ meeting, there was a heated discussion over Repsat, which had taken a hit in the last week. Repsat represents the positive responses in a survey triggered by client to customer at the end of a chat session.
After the meeting I asked Vaibhav, "Why not focus on Repsat? Our client has always wanted to increase customer satisfaction by investing in new technology and by upgrading their systems. I am sure that if we improve Repsat, our client will be happy. Moreover, it could be a factor that differentiates eClerx from others”.
After giving it some thought, Vaibhav said, "Let's aim for increasing Repsat."
A DMAIC project was initiated and a team was formed. The project was sponsored and directly monitored by Amit, Vertical Head of Customer-Service-Operations. In the ’Improve’ phase, we faced a few roadblocks— agents reluctant to follow the improved process, many changes in Workflow tool, and changes in training related activities. We grouped solutions into three buckets— software, process, and training— and assigned separate teams to these areas. The new process designed with Poka-Yokes, made it easy for the agents to follow process steps.
After we implemented the solutions, we started seeing improvement in Repsat figures. Needless to mention, our client also observed this rapid increase in eClerx Repsat figures.
About four weeks later, Amit called for a meeting and said, “I just received a call from client. They are so impressed and delighted with the initiative that we took to improve the Repsat numbers. Congratulations to Vaibhav and his team on the successful completion of this project. Hope we receive some good news soon”.
In our weekly review with client, we explained the actions taken at eClerx for Repsat improvement.
The client appreciated our in-depth analysis in the project and our commitment towards improving the end customer satisfaction.
Two weeks after our client review, we received the much awaited email from client proposing to increase the head counts by nearly 30% in a span of three months.
Lessons Learned
- We learnt that grouping solutions into multiple buckets helps in improving focus
- Implementing Poka-Yoke helps in overcoming the resistance towards process change