There are three extremely lucrative, and notionally simple, improvement opportunities in nearly all service centers that can be used to optimize the cost structure. Let's set global outsourcing to the side for a moment and focus on investments in the existing center requiring absolutely minimal technology investments. Naturally a significant investment in CRM software can reap even larger rewards, but many centers do not have access to large amounts of capital and need near term fixes to make their next budget.

First, invest in leadership and management. This is particularly critical at the supervisory level. The supervisors directly impact the quality, culture and productivity of a service center every minute of every day. Most supervisors have never been trained to do their jobs, have never been given a methodology for thinking about their jobs, and have never been provided with a systematic practice for optimizing their work environment.

Most supervisors are merely serving as escalation points for customer complaints and as adult day care disciplinarians. This is an almost complete waste of their time and potential expertise. If you don't know exactly (this is a 100% practical regimen, its not theoretical physics) what your supervisors should be doing with every minute of their day, then they don't either. Get it fixed.

Supervisors need to continually improve quality, which reduces re-work by 30-50%. Supervisors need to lead the culture, which reduces attrition by 10-25%. Supervisors need to manage productivity, which drives occupancy (paid productive hours) from 50% to 70%--an effective FREE staff increase of 40%.

Second, invest in customer experience optimization (CEOps) staff to maximize the productive delivery of value to your customers, otherwise known as the elimination of waste. Ideally there are three disciplines (remember we agreed to leave out technology for now, bring them in later) focused on CEOps for your center. Get degreed professionals with 5-10 years of experience for these roles. These are not jobs for volunteers or ambitious amateurs. Professional in training development, quality engineering, and a production supervisor should be assigned to the CEOps task force along with one of your direct reports, or yourself.

This group focuses on floor level practical training first. Do people know how to do their job (90%+ of the time with 90%+ accuracy) when the customer calls? Once they know how to do the job, the next question is whether the job makes sense? Build the process maps and eliminate obvious stupidity, dead ends, and busy work. Focus here on root causes that extend outside of the center and the degree of transaction standardization with internal and external customers. Begin to eliminate inspection, re-work and waste in favor of highly trained employees doing the job correctly the first time.

The CEOps staff will reinforce the focus on quality, culture and productivity established by your newly trained supervisory cadre. They also take much of the analytical work associated with measurement, forecasting, staffing, and throughput standards off the supervisor's shoulders so they can focus on leading and managing. At this point there should be a clearly defined set of operational reports and quality measures with attendant improvements across the board.

Third, invest in front line development. Culture and development opportunities are the two biggest anti-attrition measures. You're already investing in culture by training your supervisors. Optimization in a service center requires a reduction in unproductive attrition. Productive attrition is someone taking a promotion within your center or company. Unproductive attrition is that same person taking the promotion at a competitor; or worse, taking a lateral move just to escape your crummy environment.

No center can afford the churn and burn associated with excess attrition. Assume your hiring costs are $500 a person for an employee making $25,000 a year. Training costs are another $1,500 for two weeks. Lost productivity on the learning curve is $5,000 over six months. At 25% attrition in a 500-person center that is $875,000 a year invested simply in churn.

Development does not mean that everyone gets to be President of the company. It does mean that everyone is constantly being challenged to do more, to learn more, to create a service environment where customers know they have interacted with a deeply professional organization that sincerely cares about the value of their relationship.

These three non-technical investments are relatively low-cost but require a significant commitment of your time. There has to be a concerted drive to fundamentally change a service environment into a world-class organization, but the improvements in client value, employee satisfaction and productivity can be staggering.

Copyright © 2007, Lotus Pond Media