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Vangent, Inc.: Ensuring Return on Service Improvement Efforts

By TMCnet Special Guest
John Iverson, Quality Director, Vagent

Contact centers, where products are intangible and each customer may have their own requirements, can struggle with applying “traditional” quality and continuous improvement tools.   It may seem like a leap of faith for a service business to consider using methods like ISO 9001, Six Sigma, Lean, and Total Quality Management which have roots in manufacturing. But the transition isn’t as difficult as it may appear. 

Vangent, Inc. recently awarded the Gold Medal for Best Outsourced Contact Center at the Contact Center World Top Ranking Performers Best in Americas Conference, has used Six Sigma and ISO 9001 consistently to improve performance across their organization. 

According to John Iverson, Quality Director at Vangent Inc, “to realize improvements using these methods, contact center organizations like Vangent must first understand unique service performance drivers and then apply each method’s principles to support organizational needs. “

Who Are Your Customers and What Do They Want?

Iverson notes that the first challenge in implementing any quality improvement method for contact centers is to identify each set of stakeholders and the experiences or outcomes each is seeking. It sounds easy, but most service organizations have difficulty both in coming up with a complete list of stakeholders and in determining what they want. Lean Six Sigma offers tools that simplify this seemingly daunting task such as SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Processes, Outputs, & Customers) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD - a.k.a. House of Quality) diagram.

Listing out processes and outputs is a helpful way for organizations to identify customers. For many service organizations, stakeholders include buyers, sponsors, and internal customers in addition to service recipients. Ensuring customer focus at the onset will mean a higher chance of success later. 

Brian Dye, Program Quality Manager for Vangent’s award-winning center, also says that direct interaction is the best way to learn what each set of stakeholders wants as an experience or outcome.   Asking stakeholders both what they see as high quality and unacceptable quality provides insight that goes beyond specifications. 

“Because it can be difficult for stakeholders to articulate quality differentiators, tools like a Cause & Effects (C&E) Matrix can help map customer requirements and weigh them against existing processes and services,“  Dye said.

What Customers Say About Your Quality

Another method to gain understanding, Iverson adds, is to experience both your own service and a competitor’s service from various stakeholder perspectives. Expectations are strongly guided by experience. Increased and objective awareness of available services can help an organization determine improvement opportunities.

The understanding of how stakeholders evaluate quality allows the fundamental element of any quality improvement methodology – metrics. Whether the organization calls them key process indicators (KPIs), critical to quality (CTQs), or simply metrics, the ability to define quality in terms that can be measured allows quality to be baselined and compared over time. A metric plan should include measures from each stakeholder perspective and should work back from customer outcomes to process attributes and even process inputs that drive those outcomes. Whereas inputs in manufacturing may be physical supplies, remember that inputs to service may be information such as product or customer awareness.

Service & Lean Six Sigma Links

Once service performance drivers have been defined, an organization is ready to apply methods such as Lean Six Sigma in a way that aligns to improvement perceptible by stakeholders.  Though the entire toolset may not apply, the core concepts that have made Lean Six Sigma successful are still very capable of supporting organizational improvement. In fact, the link between speed and quality make service an ideal application for Lean Six Sigma. 

“The key to service application is to stick to the driving principles and desired outcomes and to avoid being bogged down in specific tools or activities that do not support improvement,” said Dye. He points to the example of one of Vangent’s award-winning contact centers.

Customer-focused Goals

 The first step in a Lean Six Sigma project is to define a specific improvement goal. A service organization that has created an effective metric plan can use its existing metrics to target improvements linked to specific stakeholder groups. Having several stakeholder groups with unique quality perspectives provides more project opportunities; however, selection and prioritization can be a challenge when stakeholders have conflicting goals.  It is important to consider all stakeholders even when targeting an improvement for one set.

Dye notes that at Vangent contact centers improvement projects are discussed with the client before selection.  “With a planned number of contact center agents, a key factor in the center’s ability to provide prompt service is schedule adherence. “ He adds that when an inconsistency was discovered in schedule adherence performance across sites, a Lean Six Sigma project was launched to review and improve performance. From the beginning, the stakeholder benefit of the project was clear.

Employee Involvement

According to Dye, another important consideration at the start of each project is employee involvement. Assembling a project team capable of creating improvement is an important process step of Lean Six Sigma. Planning employee involvement from all levels is key to realizing service improvements and needs to be considered when the project team is formed. 

From the onset of Vangent’s schedule adherence project, project leaders realized that the process was controlled by customer service agents and supervisors. Without their involvement and support, improvement would not be achieved. 

By including the agents and supervisors in the project, the root issue of multiple interpretations of how schedule exceptions should be applied and approved was discovered. Further analysis determined that 75% of schedule exceptions were CSR (News - Alert) driven, same-day exceptions – some approved and some not. Exception code use was inconsistent.

The reliance on people to create service value cannot be overstated, and efforts should be made to include as many employee perspectives as possible. Since it is not generally feasible to include all employees on the project team, frequent outreach and focused survey inputs can keep employees part of the process.

“The more employee involvement can be enlisted, the better the ideas and buy-in from those that are charged with yielding the improvements,” said Dye.

Acceptance of Attribute Data

 Lean Six Sigma teaches that variable (continuous) data is highly preferable to attribute (discrete) data. Service measurement relies heavily on attribute data such as customer satisfaction scores. Fortunately, plenty of tools exist that allow for sufficient analysis of attribute data; controls charts, DPMO, and Pareto charts can all be useful. Metrics expressed as percentages follow variation patterns that are similar to a normal distribution. Most importantly, improving discrete metrics such as customer satisfaction or on time percentage has the same positive impact that improving manufacturing tolerances does.

At Vangent, schedule adherence was measured as a percentage, Dye notes. The count of exception codes was discrete, and code usage was normalized by dividing by the total number of codes used. For instance, initial analysis showed that over 20% of schedule exceptions were for 10 minutes or less. Exceptions were also normalized against the number of agents. The number of exceptions per agent per week became a key metric used to track project success.

Application of Lean Principles

 An advantage to applying Lean in the Measure and Analyze steps in a service improvement project is that a focus on eliminating waste supports the goals of all stakeholders. The biggest source of waste in service is time. Wasted time can lead to service delays and increased costs. Lean tools such as value stream mapping and a spaghetti diagram can be effective in identifying and then reducing this waste. 

Vangent’s schedule adherence project is a great example of time equating to service quality. Time away from the phone drives delays in answering speed.  "We applied Lean principles throughout the project and the biggest source of “waste” in schedule adherence was determined to be short-duration, same-day exceptions that agents were taking with or without approval,” said Dye.  He notes that one agent taking an extra five minute break did not make a significant impact to service in a contact center staffed with hundreds of agents, but many agents taking extra breaks throughout the day did.

Focus: Outcome Improvement over Process Adherence 

Detractors of Lean Six Sigma point out that it can stifle innovation by focus on standardization and process “control.” This risk is especially applicable to service organizations that rely on human individuality to deliver service value. 

To avoid this pitfall, create a control plan that focuses primarily on outcomes while limiting process requirements to what is necessary to support those outcomes. In many cases, process guidelines are sufficient. For example, one goal of every contact center is to provide accurate information. 

“Though it’s possible to increase accuracy by making every aspect of the call scripted, a fully scripted call can remove the human element that provides value to the caller,” said Iverson.  “In many cases, you can achieve the same level of improvement by limiting scripting to greeting and answer delivery and then providing guidelines on how to understand the inquiry and close the call. “

However, for Vangent’s schedule adherence project, more control over the process was the key to improvement. Variation in how supervisors and agents were applying exception guidelines created extra and untracked time not serving customers. To improve the actual percentage of time in queue, the process was redefined and deployed. More specific guidelines were developed, and approval for exceptions was limited to a small set of trained supervisors. These changes created increased consistency, decreasing the misuse of codes by 97%. Moreover, the project resulted in more time supporting customers, with a 29% drop in the number of exceptions per agent per week.

Applying quality methodologies to service may not be straight forward, but it can be done. By understanding how stakeholders define quality and then tailoring approaches such as Lean Six Sigma to improve the processes that drive quality, service organizations can create dramatic performance gains. 

For more information on how to apply quality methodologies to service, visit American Society for Quality’s Service Quality Body of Knowledge at http://asq.org/service/body-of-knowledge/index.html .

John Iverson, Vangent (www.Vangent.com ) John.iverson@vangent.com

John is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Lead Editor of ASQ’s Service Body of Knowledge. At Vangent, John has realized profound service quality turnarounds and millions of dollars in savings applying the principles in this article.

Brian Dye, Vangent (www.Vangent.com )Brian.dye@vangent.com

Brian is a Six Sigma Black Belt and quality and process improvement expert. He currently serves as the program manager of the Quality Analysis & Continuous Improvement group for Vangent’s Beneficiary Contact Center. He has successfully deployed Six Sigma, ISO 9001, and COPC (News - Alert) methodologies across a variety of customer facing and business facing programs.