Lean Part 1: Waste and the Customer Experience

Waste Reduction and Enterprise Call Management

The customer experience is central to business operations, but day to day operations can get in the way of providing optimal experiences. You can’t afford to waste a single customer interaction.

This waste, in terms of lean management practices, is referred to as “muda”. It’s the amount of time and other valuable resources that are spent in a way that prevents us from optimizing the customer’s care (Bruce Golden, PhD, 2010). But where is the most obvious intersection of waste and the customer experience? The voice channel of course!

How does your enterprise manage customer calls? Are they queued for a centralized contact center agent or operator? Do they encounter frustrating and slow phone trees during their journey?

Your call management processes could be wasting time and resources. Are your contact center agents spending time on transfers and agent-to-agent handoffs or managing routine general information call? Is the receptionist in your field office trying to juggle calls, walk up visitors, and other office duties? Many of these practices are wasteful in a number of different ways. Not only do they create inefficiency and unnecessary expenses, but they negatively impact the customer experience and keep customers from receiving the assistance they need in a timely fashion.

Finally, a messy voice channel wastes the opportunity to make a positive impression. Rather than a smooth, uninterrupted path to their destination, customers are bounced around and frustrated by a messy mix of different call handling methods and disorganized IVRs.

Stay tuned for the next Chapter in our recurring study, Lean Practices for Call Management. Next week will look at how analysis of waste can be easily addressed through incremental improvements to deliver a Lean, mean, and consistent patient experience.