Six Sigma in Customer Service

I have been in and out of call centers and contact centers speaking with leaders of those groups for the better part of the last 8 years. I have been in big centers and in small. I have worked with companies that have 20,000 agents and companies that have 20 agents. And one of the things that I see over and over again is the tension that exists between management and reps about what is the best way to solve a customers problem. To distill it down, what is the right process to follow and how do you change that process to fit the changing business.

On one end of the spectrum you have companies that have very little process and their main goal is to just please the customer in whatever way the rep deems appropriate. This is the ultimate in employee enablement. Then you have the other end of the spectrum that has a process for everything and wants the rep to follow that process all the time without deviation. This end also tends to change the process only when bad things happen.

Somewhere in between exists a middle ground of harmony between enablement and process that makes both the agent feel good and the customer feel good about getting their questions answered. Then the question becomes, how do you do this? Is there an approach or a methodology that can help? Is the approach different for different companies?

I can't answer that question here on my blog for two reasons. One, I am not in your company and will never tell people what they should do without first understanding the situation. Number two, every company is different so giving blanket advice in this case is just foolish.

What I will say though is that I have been meeting with more and more companies that are finding value in using Six Sigma like methodology and approaches to how they manage customer service teams. I am told that the value that they are seeing in using this approach mostly comes from putting in place the mechanisms to continually measure and change what you are doing as a group in order to be both efficient and relevant to your end users.

Getting more specific, I know of a number of companies that are using the methodology to enforce good decision making around how they make changes to the process around service on new products of services. This is a great place to introduce the concepts and ideas and see if they work for you. I know of one retailer, very large, that was looking to add some new services to their offering to their customers. Instead of going to either of the extremes by giving reps full autonomy or locking them in to a rigid process that was not going to change, they used the Six Sigma approach. They first understood their goals with a core team of different stakeholders and baselined themselves with hard data. They then put in place concepts or ideas as to how the process should work. They then built out the process with ideas and technology in a way that they thought would be best. They then piloted the process with a small group of people. Next came collecting data on how they did. Then they iterated on the process to make it better and better. Finally then releasing out to all the agents.

I don't know if Six Sigma or derivatives of this approach are right for everyone. But I know that the methodology and approach has worked for a number of companies to help them evolve their customer service delivery teams. If you are struggling today to find the balance of how to bring new processes to your teams, it might be worth the time to look into a methodology that can help you over the long term.