How our Lean process improvement created real ROI and drove huge value to customers

As we looked at the fresh monthly operational KPI scorecard, the breadth of the impacts from 6 months of rigorous and relentless process surgery became clear to my team and I.? 53% higher first call resolution rate; 26% better end-to-end resolve cycle and 25% higher customer satisfaction. Our support team was operating hyper-efficiently to deliver great customer experience results.?

How had we moved these needles so dramatically?? It wasn't just luck (like hope, luck isn't a strategy)- there were 2 pillars to our work on these.? The first was a long and extensive process improvement focus based on lean principles around our customer support ticket journey.? The second is that there was no single silver bullet- we made over a dozen changes that collectively drove these overall results.

Using Lean as a framework to break down processes, identify waste, and re-assemble them as agile, optimized and value focused

Whether used formally through the 5 core principles and associated practices, or as a general framework to guide improvement, Lean focuses on improving efficiency and effectiveness by eliminating waste, and thinking about creating value with optimized resources.? Sometimes a simple journey map can uncover big and obvious gaps and non-value add parts of a process or workflow; other circumstances may call for a full formal lean project to find waste in every corner possible.?

Our top discoveries and changes based on support process journey maps

Using 10 common customer issues, we mapped the customer journey and support touchpoints in granular detail.? It took time and focus, but out of this exercise, three really big and painful gaps surfaced.?

First, the frontline teams weren’t able to easily find current or reliable knowledge articles or documentation around some of these customer issues.? While lots of content was being created, we weren’t doing a great job with keywording and search optimization to make the information discoverable.? Re-tooling our support knowledgebase (KCS) approach with search and keyword analytics to dramatically improve findability of relevant information quickly, we were able to ?drive a much higher article hit rate at the frontline tiers which in turn drive up their first touch resolve rates.

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When frontline tiers couldn’t find relevant issue information as uncovered above, they needed to bring in higher tier resources to assist, it wasn’t uncommon to chew through days of time working to schedule a callback with the customer.? Phone tag and email tag are painfully manual ways to try and connect support agents with customers.? The team researched automated scheduling solutions and found one that integrated with our CRM that allowed customers to view an agents schedule, pick and book a time directly for a call.? This was one of the more rewarding process wastes to remove, because once it was deployed, average case aging across the team literally fell by 5 days.? This simple but painful gap was literally wasting that much process throughput.? The cherry on top- customers loved it.

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Finally, when a higher tier agent did get on the call with the customer, getting hands on the needed information to troubleshoot complex issues was extremely cumbersome and time consuming.? Particularly for complex issues (a small but resource intensive set of support issues), the system, environment and application logs with the data needed to isolate issue causes were not simple for customers to obtain or share with our agents.? And when they did, it was a very manual and painstaking exercise to review the detail, derive relevant issue factors, troubleshoot, observe and confirm the resolution.? Moreover, customers understandably grew impatient, frustrated and unhappy with this process.?

The team surfaced a tool that one of the tier 3 agents had been tinkering with, that could pull relevant logs and data from the customers environment. With some dedicated resources, the creator was able to extend the tools capabilities, include anomaly flagging and knowledgebase content linking.? The new iteration automated the most arduous complex issue troubleshooting steps and vastly increased root cause analysis speed.? And the tool continues to iterate functionality, with increasing value as a tool for our support teams.

The promise, and value realized

Optimizing knowledgebase efficacy, automating needlessly manual and time consuming tasks, and leveraging better tools to remove burden around complex tasks; our investment in discovering these types of process waste and eliminating them in agile and innovative ways paid huge ROI and very tangible customer value.? That’s the promise and value of Lean.?

“Let’s go back and do these process audits regularly!”?

As we wrapped up the team review that day, they energetically called out the final and maybe most important Lean principle- continuous improvement, baking this power into the ongoing business cadence.

I love hearing about others experience, successes and best practices around these topics- please don't hesitate connect with me to chat!

About me:?I’m an experienced Customer Support leader, building, scaling and leading SaaS support and service delivery organizations with a mission to embed customer support into the product value proposition.

[email protected]?|??www.dhirubhai.net/in/robarmstrongpm/ |?robarmstrong.online?

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