Do you need (BPI) Business Process Improvement?

Do you need (BPI) Business Process Improvement?

Here are some questions you can ask yourself about your business.  If you can answer no to one or more of them, then it may be time to get an Outside Perspective.  We  can help improve a simple process to designing and building an enterprise wide continual process improvement plan.

• If you ask any associate what the company goal is, what the department goal is and what their individual goal is, do they have an answer?  (Is there alignment from the bottom to the top)
• Do your associates have a single place to be able to submit suggestions for improvement, can check the status of and get an incentive for the submissions of ideas that have big savings? (Can front line associates make a difference)
• Do you have a team dedicated to process improvement initiatives, if so are they paying for themselves ten times over?  (centralized oversight of process improvement or conflicted initiatives)
• Do you have a single driving force behind all process improvement initiatives at your company?
• Do you have a regular set of process improvement KPI that you measure to understand how well your process improvement initiatives are working? Are they the right KPI?
• Do you have a list of prioritized opportunities with ROI in order to understand what the next goals are? (Do you have a pipeline, who owns it and how well is it performing)
• Do you know the fully loaded cost of each associate in order to be able to made decisions for the company?
• Do you know the pay difference between associates within the same position and how it relates to the quality or quantity of their output?
• Do you know how many unneeded steps are currently being performed before your customer gets their product delivered? (Customer Effortless Experience)
• Do you have a complete inventory of your toll free numbers, cost associated per minute of each of them?
• Does your IVR cause customers frustrations, what are your self-services rates within the IVR, what other opportunities are there within the IVR and what other opportunities exist? (Customer Experience)
• How many steps could be eliminated through better associate tool design? (Associates Satisfaction, reduced training time, improved customer experience)
• Are you using speech analytics for more than just something to listen to calls?
• How many unnecessary customer contacts is your company generating through poor internal coordination? (outages, bill changes, maintenance, marketing traffic) (Change management, problem management)
• Do you want to continue to throw money at more staff, more tools, more software or outsource jobs?

The Power Of 3

We are not talking about the 5 why’s but the power of 3.  What is the power of 3?  It allows you to group what you are working on into three categories to better prioritize the work that you are going to perform in order to more successfully accomplish your goals.  This is not an industry standard just a practice that we have found ourselves using over the years and it has worked out extremely well.

Here are 3 examples (yes 3) of how Outside Perspective logically groups services we offer into 3’s.

• Outside Perspective offers three levels of engagement: 1. Finding Opportunities, 2. Creating Solutions and 3. Implementing Solutions.
• Outside Perspective focuses our process improvement on: 1. People, 2. Processes, 3. Strategy
• Outside Perspective achieves our goals through: 1.Observation, 3.Analysis 3. Interaction

So how does this translate to your business?  Let’s look at an example of a company that was focused on reducing contact rates (CPx) of their customers.  This contact rate was roughly 500,000 contacts per month.  You can imagine the savings potentials.  After working to better understand their goals, business model and analysis of their data we found the three categories that we would use to tackle CPx. Before, During and After customer contact.

With these defined we were able to develop them into better descriptions with overall goals.  Drivers, deflection and contact.

1. Drivers were something within their control that would cause a customer to potentially make contact. Contact Drivers.  The goal was to reduce these contact drivers.
2. Contact meant the customer was now engaged with an employee of their company. The goal is to improve efficiencies at the agent level in order to reduce labor costs as well as improve customer and associate satisfaction.