Overview:

Process Redesign for a Customer Service unit in an International Professional Society

Business Issue:

An international professional society with nearly 50,000 members and Fellows was seeing little success in resolving ongoing, department-wide issues that created increased fulfillment times and service escalations, and decreased customer service survey results. The staffing model was dependent on a mix of full-time temporary, part-time temporary, and full-time permanent team members siloed into inefficient tasks and processes. Compounding the model and process issues over the previous years, the Customer Service department had become the default landing spot for many misaligned fulfillment activities and tasks. The organization engaged us to conduct a strategic assessment of the operations and implement the required changes.

Actions:

• Evaluated 50+ Customer Service activities through interviews, observations, and data analysis, providing recommendations to reduce the Customer Service team burden through redistribution of non-essential and out-of-scope activities to more appropriate departments.
• Developed a detailed, seasonally-adjusted staffing model to project hourly staffing levels to meet service level and activity requirements.
• Provided leadership support and operational oversight as the interim department manager and liaison to the organization’s leadership team, to prioritize and implement recommendations and key process improvements within the department.
• Sourced and implemented call center reporting software to provide management with the increased level of detail required to increase agent availability and service levels.

Results:

• Implemented a more data-driven management approach across the service center ensuring that time-sensitive activities had the available capacity to perform at high service levels.
• Designed and implemented summary and detail level dashboards to allow for effective day-to-day management of the various customer service and fulfillment activities in the move to a metrics-driven structure.
• Enabled the organization to provide a consistent service level to its Members and Fellows by aligning activities to the functional area closest to the member.
• Escalated and prioritized the replacement of a functionally-misaligned email and ticketing system, eliminating the activity backlog and creating capacity to improve call handling service levels.
• Increased the number of logged phone and email contacts to provide a more complete and meaningful, member profile to the organization.