Six Sigma Case Studies : Improving Quality including Customer Satisfaction

Industry: Service provider

Background

The client is a leading North American telecommunications company that provides a wide range of communications products and services including data, Internet Protocol (IP), voice, entertainment and video. The client outsourced some of its technical support requirements for its ADSL and Dial-up Internet services to TELUS International. TELUS International was tasked to improve the Quality metrics including:

• Overall Satisfaction Rating (OSR)
• One Call Resolution (OCR)
• Customer Service Representative (Agents) Satisfaction Rating (CSR)

A Six Sigma Green Belt project was launched by the TELUS International Business Process Improvement team.

The challenge

In the Define Phase, the team used Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) and Pareto analyses to determine the top drivers of customer dissatisfaction with respect to agents’ technical skills. It was determined that agent knowledge, inefficient troubleshooting and unresolved issues were key factors. As part of the Measure and Analyze Phases, Process Mapping, Process Value analysis and Cause-and-Effect analysis were conducted leading to the discovery of the following Key Process Input Variables (KPIVs):

• Poor probing skills
• Specific support boundaries and ownership of issues were unclear
• Existing QA Audit Sheet was not aligned with Quality metrics

Solution

In the Improve and Control Phases, the team systematically addressed KPIVs by focusing on the following:

• Enhancements were made to the client’s troubleshooting tool to make it more user-friendly and up-to-date – enabling agents to improve probing skills when dealing with customers
• Escalation and transfer processes were documented and an escalation matrix was created to enable agents’ to quickly determine issues that required higher support levels
• The QA Audit Sheet was revised to include attributes that are strongly correlated with the Quality metrics, particularly communication skills, technical skills and soft-skills

Results

Quality and satisfaction metrics improved significantly:

• Average Overall Satisfaction Rating (OSR) improved from 50% to 76%
• Average One Call Resolution Rating (OCR) improved from 43% to 55%
• Average Customer Service Representative Satisfaction Rating (CSR) improved from 76% to 82%