Just lately I have been researching into Six Sigma in the contact center. While I am sure the consultants have good intentions, it seems to me that there is a danger that much of the written summary of these efforts distract organizations from the real issue.

But before I get into where I think contact center managers should concentrate, I should stress that I see nothing wrong with the principles of Six Sigma as applied to the manufacturing process. Production managers clearly want to produce high quality products, so the principle of setting target tolerances, measuring whether outputs fall within these tolerances and if they don’t then investigating why and correcting the root cause is obviously a very sound methodology to follow. The problem in the contact center is that the processes are very people oriented and people just can’t follow such a rigorous set of processes - emotions, personalities, relationships, skills and many other factors just get in the way. And implementing a full Six Sigma adds considerable cost to the operation, which is something contact centers have to avoid.

So where should mangers focus? Virtually all the research I carry out shows that companies are driven to try and improve customer satisfaction with the way their interactions are handled, and to do this they need to focus on the customer experience – get this right and customers will be happier, stay loyal and probably buy more, get it wrong and bye, bye customer. But in doing this managers have to balance efficiency and effectiveness – two objectives that are often in conflict with one and other.

My research into agent performance management shows that efficiency in a contact center boils down to trying to handle as many calls with as few agents as possible, whereas effectiveness is all about trying to achieve an outcome from each interaction that is satisfactory for both the customer and the business. Efficiency means that companies focus on metrics such as volume of calls handled, average call handling time, agent utilization, and amount of after call work, whereas almost less than half as many companies focus on effectiveness measures such as first call resolution rates, customer wallet share, and life-time customer value. Then there are companies that focus on what are neither efficiency or effectiveness measures. Two popular examples are customer satisfaction (which most companies don’t have a method to measure objectively) which doesn’t say how efficiently an interaction was handled or whether the customer is likely to call gain, buy more, or even remain loyal, and net promoter scores which don’t indicate if the customer will actually recommend anyone and if they do whether that person would sign up (which most companies would find hard to measure).

So I believe that companies must first decide on a balanced set of metrics to monitor and assess how their centers are working as I discussed in (“Customer Metrics – The Good, Bad and the Ugly”), put processes and technology in place to deliver those metrics and then judge how well they are doing. At this point applying the base principle of Six Sigma would then be a sound process to adopt i.e. if the metrics don’t match set targets, then investigate the root causes, do something about them and measure again to see if the results improve. Such a process should see an improvement in both efficiency and effectiveness without requiring the additional costs involved in implementing a formal Six Sigma process.

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Regards,

Richard Snow, VP & Research Director