Lean Thinking in a Call Centre
General Insurance
Download a printer-friendly PDF – Reinvigoration General Insurance Call Centre Case Study
Background
The call centre handled 20,000 calls each week from customers who wanted to query, amend or cancel their home insurance policy. Close to 200 FTE were employed to handle this demand, with staff split across three sites, two in the UK and one in India.
Many of the calls received were to correct mistakes made during earlier processes. As a result, levels of complaints were high. The call abandonment rate was also high and peak times seemed unmanageable, often with many customers waiting for their calls to be answered. This caused panic amongst local managers who would instruct staff to take messages off customers for them to be called back, a practice that compounded their problems.Approach
A REINVIGORATION consultant used a deep understanding of Lean Service techniques to fully diagnose and understand the problem at hand, before working towards solutions.
- Initial process observations and call listening revealed that many of the calls received were failure demand (created as a result of a process failure) and avoidable
- A team of local staff were trained on how to identify value demand vs. failure demand. This training was designed using their actual calls to aid understanding. The definition of value demand began by gaining an understanding of the purpose of the process from the customer’s perspective
- Once this purpose was understood, the local team were able to categorise demand into failure demand and value demand. They completed a data collection exercise where a representative sample of calls were listened to and the category of demand recorded. Failure demand was found to be running close to 50%
- An improvement action plan was then created to tackle and eradicate the causes of failure demand
- In addition, additional training was completed to ensure that all staff members could deal with common queries, thus reducing handoffs
Results
The approach used drove significant improvement in the area including:
- Call volumes reduced by 30% by driving out or minimising the causes of failure demand
- Abandonment rate dropped from over 15% to less than 3%
- Internal transfers / handoffs were slashed resulting in a much improved customer experience
- Large amounts of capacity created generating significant financial benefits
