Case Study – Improve Information Sharing with Call Center Planning

Project Title: Improve Information Sharing with Call Center Planning

Define

Project sponsor: Jeremy

Project Green Belt: Michelle

Any time that a product or service is launched, DST, STS, Marketing and other groups must coordinate their efforts to succeed. With the existing lack of coordination and multiple communication channels, documents were “flying all over the place” and no one was sure who had which document. Because of this, it was impossible to define a “defect.” Over 200 stakeholders were involved, including sales operations, business line leaders, and program managers.

Measure and Analysis

Michelle began by identifying the customer needs – the needs of each group involved in a product launch. For those requirements, she identified specific characteristics. Using a Qualify Function Deployment chart, she was able to rank the preferences and come up with a set of design requirements.

Improve and Control

From this, several solutions were brainstormed, and each solution tested against the requirements, receiving a performance rating. QuickBase was identified as the solution for centralized document storage.

Yet another QuickBase? Yes, but a very specifically designed one that hit every single Critical to Quality item that customers asked for.

Documents could be reached with 3 clicks. Reminders were set up for record owners and process owners. After testing the QuickBase, the users were surveyed and all of them rated the solution in the top 2 boxes. All comments were positive!

Summary

 A Six Sigma Green Belt worked with the call center manager and her sponsor to drill down to root causes of a problem that was causing significant employee dissatisfaction and costing the company wasted money. By developing a change plan that addressed the causes she was able to quickly reduce the magnitude of the problem and improve scheduling efficiency. The result was a “double whammy” of greatly improved productivity and lower costs. The control system she put in place with the process owner assured that the results would be maintained long-term.